LMS that is not for me: Blackboard

My user role: student

My main problems with blackboard: discussion board suxorz because it encourages overly-long posts; no live chat/synchronous collaboration platform; content is not matched to discussions... tagging? chat space?

I recently took an online course through the school of continuing studies at U of T, hosted on the blackboard application platform. Let me be very clear here: I am not commenting on the course or the course content. So when I say that "blackboard sucks balls", I am criticizing neither the course, nor my classmates, nor the professor.

My main problems were encountered in the user forum feature, and with the course materials posts.  This was an online course, so the only way for students to interact was through virtual sources. Blackboard's main virtual interaction feature was the forum.  This is a pretty classic style of discussion-by-post.  However, with Blackboard, you can not review the discussion thread when you try to enter your own reply. Allow me to clarify. If 8 students have each posted twice, and you want to reply to the most recent post, you are only able to review the most recent one when composing your own comment. This made conversation particularly difficult, and it seemed to encourage users to make "megaposts": 700 - 1000 word single-post rants that were never followed-up.

This brings me to the course material tools.  Professors can post material, but students can only comment on the same material in the forum. That is, you can only comment on your readings by navigating away from said readings and creating a new forum thread.  This proved quite tedious.  A better design would have allowed students to post comments or thoughts right away, through tagging, or the ability to manipulate course materials. If giving students the ability to manipulate course material is too much (too social constructivist), then at least the ability to respond to material by sending a "like" or "dislike" message would have been useful.

Additionally, the tools for synchronous interaction were completely lacking.  In an age of Skype or (now defunct) Google Wave, one would think that synchronous communication tools would be normal features of a virtual learning environment. It's not like there are not any tools for integrating features that are lacking...

Based on my experience in the course, I'd have to say that I was quite disappointed by the features offered by Blackboard.  Especially with regard to my own concerns, deploying enterprise learning materials, I believe that I have to shop around for something better.