Blackboard Learning System

Blackboard Learning System (named after those things with chalk in classrooms that are more likely to be green) is a system for managing course data and learning materials for educational institutions. It is a commercial, proprietary system that is used by many universities which pay steep licensing fees for it. This is somewhat ironic given that universities are full of talented computer geeks, and were developing stuff for computers and the Internet for decades before such things became a commercial field outside big-corporate data processing, so just why is it that they have to outsource the management of their educational computing structure to some commercial firm instead of getting their own geeks working on something less proprietary? Actually, there is a nonproprietary alternative in Moodle, but lots of colleges are still using Blackboard instead.

Transferring data between Blackboard and Moodle is sometimes possible, but hampered by the proprietary and ever-changing nature of Blackboard's data.

Links

 * Wikipedia article
 * Official site
 * Paper discussing system
 * Discussion of Blackboard upload file formats
 * Convert documents to file types that work in Blackboard
 * Blackboard test generators
 * Lovecraftian rant about the horrors of Blackboard