Blackboard Collaborate Reviews

Summary: The only good thing I had to say about Blackboard Collaborate is the amount of features and options you have . The rest, is only negative/bad experience with this platform. I use it because I have to. It's not user friendly, it's slow, it's inefficient, it's a pain to customize and navigate the menu and it's full of little things that will drive you nuts.

Positive: Because I have to list some pros, I'll mention that there are a lot of features available to really customize you're experience as an instructor. But that's it.... the rest is in the cons section.

Negative: I could say a lot of things in here. I simply hate everything about BB Collaborate. Let's start with the awful user environment and interface. I've been using this software for 5 years and I still struggle to find things. I need every semester. Creating content, uploading files, organizing things around takes SOOO much time.
To give a simple example. If you make a file available, you give a name to the item and upload a file. Now if later you want to upload a new version of the file, you click on the upload file button and select the new file. Well, when you do that, BB, erases the name of the item, so you have to retype the name you had before. Seriously?
You have to be super careful when creating grading schemes, and your grading book because if there's an error, you won't see it until a student comes to you at the end of the semester and complain their final grade.
Navigating the different menu is so painful.
Daily/Weekly notifications are really cryptic (although they have improved recently).

Summary: Using this was an absolute nightmare I wouldn't wish on anyone. There were so many connection issues we sometimes had to set up Zoom sessions instead because the teacher or most of the students couldn't connect/stay connected. I'd say every single class had at least 10 minutes of time lost on the best of days just trying to get this to function. The screen sharing and recording failures wouldn't have been as big a deal since they didn't happen as often, but combined with the constant disconnections and group breakout issues, I can't see any reason to ever recommend this over Zoom, Teams, or any other program that allows live, recorded sessions with groups.

Positive: You can do live sessions with a lot of students. Students can be muted if they're interrupting the class and can be broken down into groups for group work. The sessions can be recorded and it's easy to make sure only the right people get access to your sessions.

Negative: Regardless of browsers and internet connection strength, everyone lost connection at some point. This was a huge problem with recording attendance. Students frequently missed class because they either couldn't connect or they were so frequently disconnected during a session they effectively weren't there at all. This happened to staff as well. So much class time was wasting due to connection issues. It didn't always record sessions either and screen sharing frequently failed. Sometimes breaking out into groups immediately disconnected people, including the teachers.