Fingernails on Blackboard

The taxpayers of the good state of Florida pay me a livable wage to produce PowerPoint slides for my students, among other things. The administrators at my university provide me with a way to store those slides online, which the taxpayers of course also pay for. The administration bought a product known as Blackboard, or Bb as it is usually written. You are going to have to take me at my word, because even if you are a Florida citizen who has paid for the slides, you can't see them. Sorry.

Even if I wanted to show them to you, I couldn't tell you how to get there anyway since my class micro-site does not have a URL! Now it turns out that there are various ways I can get around this, but you kind of have to know what you are doing, and these alternatives add work.

In a nutshell, Bb was designed for university administrators with some help for teaching classes tossed in as an afterthought. In fact, Blackboard was around for the better part of a decade before you could use it to create an internal hypertext link from one Blackboard page to another! It takes 12 different mouseclicks to create a page that says"hello world".

I wonder why they don't use Moodle, or the Sakai Project, both of which are free?