Blackboard 4+

The app is very user friendly and easy to navigate. I solely used blackboard on my laptop but had discovered my laptop broke the literal morning I started class, so I decided to download the app so I wouldn’t have to navigate blackboard on my phones browser and could more easily access my instructor’s pages. This definitely does the trick for that. The only issue I have is that the due dates tab is not fully accurate, at least for me. I have 3/4 of my classes online, so it really helps me to just click the “due dates” tap and be able to access each assignment that’s due soon. It may be due to the instructor, I have no idea, but I can see where my grades would become horrid after missing a few assignments every week. This was my first week of class and there were about 3 assignments that weren’t displayed, but I was aware of because of a syllabus or class discussion. Please make sure you’re paying attention and don’t rely solely on the app for that!! Otherwise, you may find yourself in a rut of 0 in the grade book. Aside from that, the app completely simplifies my experience with blackboard and I can’t believe I went 3 semesters without it.

The UI/UX of this app is abysmal, unpleasant to look at, extremely difficult to navigate. Previous school used Canvas which was amazing compared to BB. Fixing the user interface would be a great start. The courses tab always loads my “current” courses, but it’s actually a list of every course I’ve ever taken. If I accidentally tap on a course that has ended I have to wait forever for the app to tell me it can’t load the course. Menu items are buried in cumbersome sidebar that is easy to miss. Grades and assignments take way too many clicks and are stored in very different locations. Nothing is linked - I should be able to easily navigate to different course components without backing up to the main screen. There is no way to select any preferences, for instance, whenever I open the app I am dropped in the announcements page rather than courses - this should be a choice. The interface is absolutely hideous - it reminds me of a geocities webpage from the 90’s. Finally, many components of the app are cumbersome. It’s very difficult to access pdfs and some portions of the app open an in app browser without the open to open in a local browser. I find it exceedingly frustrating that BB hasn’t made a single attempt to improve this app in many years - hopefully major Universities will start taking their business to better platforms because this app shows a company that has no incentive to improve their product.

The app is very annoying and needs a lot of work. Why is it so difficult to navigate in the app and what’s the point of asking me if I want to stay logged in if it never keeps you logged in. Everything is all over the place and unorganized. Like other people have mentioned you have to do so many clicks just to navigate through the app. There should be a column on the bottom that has the list of grades for every class. Also why is there a calendar on the app if nothing is synced to it automatically? What’s the point of me manually adding homework on the calendar if it takes so long just to log in to the app. I can just go on my own calendar at this point. Also if we get homework synced to the calendar if we can be able to download the calendar as well or if we can sync it to our iCal and Google calendar that would be great. I go to see what’s my upcoming work I need to do and it just gives me what’s due and the date even though I have already completed that work. It should at least have it crossed out or something with the due date. Instead of having it say “due in the next 2 weeks” it should just say “due soon” or “upcoming homework” because I have it telling me that there’s homework due in the next 2 weeks but it’s literally due in a few days. How does that make sense? This app makes me go crazy. Please fix this🙏🏻