Matt Ingoglia, a junior majoring in political communication, advocates for a policy that would make professors utilize Blackboard.
Unfortunately, there’s a fairly good chance your professors have something against our friendly academic companion known as Blackboard. Maybe they find the interface too complicated, maybe they’re afraid you’ll become too dependent on it and not come to class, or maybe they just have no idea how the Internet works (this really happened to me.)
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It’s also another way to go green and not use so many handouts! One of my professors just posts the homework on blackboard in a word document.
amen!
Most professors use it anyway, and if you really need a handout/extra syllabus you can email the prof and pick it up at their office… the university really shouldn’t be forcing something on professors if it just simply isn’t their teaching style. Also you’re paying over 50k a year to go to GW, and you’re mad that you’re not getting your money’s worth out of blackboard?
Dan,
The point of making a basic Blackboard page mandatory is to eliminate the need to e-mail the professor and pick it up in their office, which depending on the professor’s schedule could take quite a while to arrange. It certainly is preferable in situations where you need the syllabus the night before an assignment is due and it’s too late to meet with the professor.
Let me address your second point. Though you seem to take a sarcastic tone in your comment, I don’t find bad values to be funny. The University pays a great deal to license Blackboard and provide it to students; the money to do this comes from our tuition payments. Seeing as an equal share of our tuition goes to this license fee, how is it fair if all 5 of your professors have Blackboard pages and only 3 of mine do? We’re paying the same amount for it, so I shouldn’t be getting 60% of the benefit you’re getting.
A Blackboard page for every class would, in addition to the environmental and economic benefits of reducing the need for paper and books, improve coordination between teachers and students. That’s something we should all want.