Decent hosted platform with poor to moderate support
What do you like best?
Blackboard Open has a great feature called the personal learning designer which allows you to automate several actions within Moodle based on events that occur in the course. This tool has been useful for delivering timely messages to students and faculty term after term, and unlocking course activities based on grade received, it has very useful features we've used regularly since first adopting them as a provider.
What do you dislike?
We've been with Open LMS since 2011 when they were originally Moodlerooms. Over that time, the support from the company degraded significantly. Frequently, issues we were having with the LMS are pushed back to us as something we were doing wrong when we clearly provided evidence otherwise. Cases will frequently go unanswered for multiple days at a time and require me to escalate them to the next level by involving our customer success manager. Blackboard's recent sale of their platform to LTG leaves us hoping that more will be invested in the case of support but that remains to be seen. The final drawback we've had with open LMS is their locked down, hashed system that is shared by multiple users. If you're looking for open access to your data, find another moodle host or expect to pay exorbitant fees to custom code a solution.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Blackboard Open has some nice features and is affordable but expect to have very limited access to your data via the system itself. Third oarty integrations are costly but can give you some access.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
We've been able to serve, develop and manage courses for thousands of students since 2011. Blackboard open is also relatively inexpensive compared to proprietary vendors.
