February 24, 2006
I Really Hate Blackboard
In my never-ending pursuit to provide better services to students and other members of the campus community, I was looking into interfacing with Blackboard, hoping that I would find a remote XML interface, such as XML-RPC or SOAP. I went to Blackboard's main site to look for documentation. I was able to download a SDK, which was helpful in that is told me nothing. I was relieved to see that there exists the Blackboard Developers Network. W00t, there I will find my answers! WRONG! In order to join, you must pay $500 (and you get a copy of Blackboard in the process). WTF! I know support is where the money is, but you can only get peer-support if you purchase the product? I was all set to dive into the Blackboard API in hopes I could make a cool interface to Blackboard, only to be denied by Blackboard's archaic business model. Shouldn't Blackboard be encouraging people to develop solutions that use Blackboard as a back-end? Congratulations Blackboard, you just turned away an interested 3rd party developer wanting to enhance your product. Way to encourage product adoption.
If anybody can provide information about the existence (or lack thereof) of a remote XML interface to Blackboard in a comment, it would be much appreciated.
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Hi Gregory,
My name is Jan Poston Day and I run the Blackboard Developer Network and the Building Blocks Program. I appreciate your feedback on the program. We are working to open our program up to more independent developers. One thing I'm currently exploring is how to reach out to student developers who may be interested in developing Building Blocks and other integrations with Blackboard as part of their computer science courses. I would be interested in talking with you more about your ideas.
You also may want to check in with the Blackboard System Administrator at Case. Clients of Blackboard get a Developers Edition license for free so they may already have a copy you can access, or could get one.
Hope to hear from you,
Jan
Director, Standards & Interoperability
jday@blackboard.com