You can bite my ass, Kent.

[obliviousally_lj]

HAHAHAHA HOW ABOUT NO?

So Kent's switching to Blackboard Learn instead of Vista in the next year and they're encouraging a lot of instructors to switch over early and get accustomed to the new software. My classes are through Vista this semester, but I was looking for something for Tony and was poking around in Blackboard when I saw this.

In Short: lol no

In Length: Here is a good writeup of what the program does, and here's another one. It's invasive and unnecessary. I get wanting to prevent students from cheating. But there's few and far between folks who don't have two computers in their home. Hell, we have five in total and I could probably kitbash a sixth one together in an evening.

Using a 'lockdown' browser to keep a student from cheating or Googling for information is ridiculous. I can turn a foot to the left and pull up Google on my PC with no issue. Most kids will do this. Others may just take their laptops to the library or student center and use a PC there to do what they need to do.

On top of that, the program apparently doesn't have an uninstaller. So you're stuck with it on your system unless you go into the registry to clear it out. That's absurd.

Not only is this program invasive, but I can think of several ways around it. First, what happens if the program malfunctions? The user, being restricted from changing any settings, is trapped in a frozen exam page, not allowed to close the program, with the timer ticking away and probably restricting new entry requests. Since the entire computer is locked down, and everything the user would use to fix the problem is purposely disabled (similarly to how a virus operates), the user's only option is to physically shut off the computer and reboot. Then I seriously doubt the user would be allowed back into the exam.

Should that student then fail the exam - just because of a restrictive program's defect (or perhaps somewhere from the page, to the server, to the browser, to the operating system, something goes wrong for them) particularly since usage has nothing to do with the course? I don't think this is too unrealistic of a circumstance, considering when I installed it the installer never dumped an uninstaller, and I had to manually delete its registries and directories in safe mode (something I don't think all OSU students are confident in doing).

It's only a matter of time before another problem arises. You may be thinking, "well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it" and blow me off like most IT staff seem to, but please consider that most problems are easier prevented than solved. A student shouldn't have to sort something like that out, turn out to be unable to reach someone, and fail a course because of software glitches. I say this, in part, because it happened to me. I got locked out of a server for one course, got a D because I couldn't reach anyone, and am retaking it this quarter. It is unfair, and the course had absolutely nothing to do with technology. My exam grades were decent, and I retained the course material well (I earned a 47 out of 50 on this mid term).