Blackboard Collaborate is an online learning platform designed to enhance virtual education experiences by integrating interactive tools and communication features for educators and students.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Blackboard Collaborate | 2.3% |
| Zoom Workplace Business | 7.4% |
| Webex | 5.2% |
| Other | 85.1% |
Blackboard Collaborate offers high-quality web conferencing tailored for educational environments, allowing real-time engagement between instructors and learners. It's equipped to support diverse communication styles, ensuring seamless collaboration within digital classrooms. This platform enhances remote learning by providing a reliable and interactive virtual classroom experience for all participants, driving better educational outcomes through its robust technology.
What are the key features?Blackboard Collaborate is implemented across various sectors, such as higher education and corporate training. Educational institutions utilize it for enhancing remote lectures, while businesses apply it for training and webinars, showcasing its versatility in supporting a broad range of learning environments.
Blackboard Collaborate was previously known as Blackboard Mobile.
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Teaching and Learning Systems Manager at a university with 5,001-10,000 employees | 3.0 | We use Blackboard Collaborate for webinars, online classes, and meetings. Its valuable features include a whiteboard and breakout rooms for group discussions. However, we experienced outages when the user limit exceeded a certain number. It integrates with our LMS. |
| Certified Adjunct Faculty, School of Engineering and Computing at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.0 | I use Blackboard Collaborate effectively to connect with students for both live and asynchronous learning, and as a content repository. However, I find it challenging for students on small devices to see detailed demonstrations due to the UI squeezing images and poor zooming. I also wish for more tutorials on engaging, hands-on content delivery. |
| Founding Member at a tech services company with 1-10 employees | 4.0 | I use this solution for classes and student meetings, appreciating its varied participation options and document annotation. While generally stable, it experiences login issues due to system overload with too many users. Despite this, I recommend it and rate it 8/10. |
| Infrastructure Expert at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.0 | I find the mobile app easy to use for tracking assignments, posting, and taking quizzes on the go, as it formats Blackboard content automatically. I only wish I could upload assignments from my mobile device. |
We use the solution in web seminars, online classrooms, and meetings.
One of the features that people enjoy is the whiteboard, providing opportunities for academics to present content and for students to contribute. The platform also allows for the creating of different rooms, enabling large classes to break into smaller groups for discussions. Students can then return to the main classroom to share their opinions. It integrates with LMS.
We faced outages when the user limit went over a certain number.
I have been working with the product for ten years.
Blackboard Collaborate is stable.
The product is scalable for up to 2000 users.
I rate Blackboard Collaborate a six out of ten.
Blackboard is our teaching environment, for both online and on campus delivery, for interfaces to publisher's content for the courseware and for instructors to upload content for planned lessons. My topic area is data modeling and database design,
When I am teaching, in advance of a scheduled meeting time for students to join the session, I upload into Collaborate content lessons (PowerPoints or PDF). During live-time sessions, I often go-to my desktop so that I can demonstrate using desktop tools for talking about and composing a simple design for a prototype. Due to the technical focus of the classes, lessons about design of data structures often begins with conceiving of and mocking up meaningful Business Intelligence outcomes. Basically, I am able to simulate the approach that I often used when in the industry.
It has been effective to run the Bb Collaborate session using Chrome, and to also connect to the Blackboardh course using a separate FireFox browser so that the course room can be visible for answering any questions & to show where to find new content.
I can now embed hyperlinks into the announcements so students can navigate to open a specific file, such as the recording of previous sessions.
The solution allows me to connect and collaborate with student live time, or asynchronously.
When teaching, I am connected and view everything on a Samsung screen 17 x 24 ins.
Originally, I was disappointed in behavior of the early Ultra version. It did not exhibit to students what I am showing on my own machine. The students are everywhere else, so it's important that they can follow along what I am showing. The user interface during sessions squeezes images to a smaller physical space. For zooming in to detail, Chrome allows enlarging an image, but in a whiteboard window it fails. It's just not feasible to visualize detail properly for the students who are connected using small devices
I often use MS Access for prototyping a design, or to talk in terms of dimension modeling, or for running queries. Some students are working on a tablet, laptop or even a cell phone. They cannot possibly see details that I do.
In the on campus classroom, I don't have that challenge. We're not using Collaborate when the same course is taught, so, displays are on a large screen in front of the room.
For online courses, a presentation of a final project will be in Collaborate, however, instead, some teachers have been allowing Adobe Connect or Zoom.
I've been using the solution for about seven years now.
The stability problems I face may be on my end. I have AT&T as a service provider for the internet. I've ordered it with the blue cord direct connect due to the fact that wireless would have too many long stalls and sometimes would just stop working altogether. Therefore, I've experienced freezing when working from a wireless connection. However, it may just be my connection.
On my Dell computer with the direct connect, I can keep a session going. I have observed that the students get knocked off and come back, and have to connect again.
Since March2020 when pandemic closed campuses, we now teach everything on-line. I am concentrating on effectiveness of having two connections to Blackboard, one to controls the Collaborate online environment and the other for navigating within the course room. To upload lessons worth saved audio I am recording within PowerPoint and saving into Course Resources for student to play. Sometime I have to split a large file into parts for an upload to complete.
While the school has thousands of students, I'm an adjunct professor with a few set classes to teach database design. The duration of each course is only four weeks. We have ten scheduled connection time slots in those four weeks.
I will soon doing more with Blackboard for the courses that I already have been teaching. If I'm going to be having meetings with the teams, we would use tools like Zoom or Team Viewer, or, if it comes down to sharing documents, it might be Google Docs. That's how I extend my teaching to help the students.
Blackboard is the good repository for all of the documents needed.
Typically, if we have issues, we contact technical support that is based at the university, which is more of an in-house team. That's become complicated now that a lot of the school has shut down due to COVID.
I've previously used a solution at a different education institution called iLink. My university switch to Blackboard about 8 years ago.
The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I just had to accept what it was that the admins were doing. The admins were learning what the tool could do, however, they didn't really get into what would be needed for teaching. Most of the teaching using Collaborate is limited to running PowerPoints.
We use the latest version of the Ultra solution.
There's always, with any tool, a simple, basic way of using the tool as the vendor supports it. That's the basics. Complications come if you're going to add content that goes beyond what is normally covered. Complications could happen. However, Collaborate isn't too complicated. Their alternative was annoying. It still is. When I'm teaching now with Ultra, I do two connections to Collaborate. One is with Chrome so that I can get past the tunnel of mirrors effect where there's an image within an image within an image, and it's a distraction. I have a second connection through Firefox. The students only connect through whatever the operating system is on their devices for viewing and for talking.
I'd rate the solution 8 out of ten.
I use this solution to meet with other teachers and to meet with students individually, as well as to meet synchronously for class. I'm a customer of Blackboard Collaborate.
This solution has provided an additional way to connect with students and they feel like it allows for participation in a variety of ways. Students who may not be as eager to participate in a regular face-to-face setting have options in which to express themselves, whether it's voice, typing or chat.
It's great that you can upload documents to use as your reference throughout your meeting and you can annotate there as well. The screen share feature is helpful and useful if you don't want to share everything that's pulled up in all of your tabs. The quality is pretty good.
I occasionally had difficulties logging in because I think that the system was overloaded with too many people. It didn't have the capacity that we needed for the number of students we had who were trying to log in at once.
An additional feature they could include would be a better tutorial video on the solution. Other than that, it's great.
I've been using this solution for three months.
It's stable for the most part. It's difficult to know whether problems are connected to the product or if they're coming from my end.
It's scalable in that you can work on multiple things at the same time but when too many people have logged on, there can be issues. I'm not sure how many people would be using this solution at any one time but there are 189,000 students at the university and many faculty and staff in addition to that. We have a techie who helps out when needed.
I had a tech specialist help with the initial setup.
I would recommend this solution.
I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.
The software is easy to use, has clear navigation and structure, and is highly customizable from an administrators standpoint (I've administered and used it as a client). It automatically formats any content on BlackBoard into Mobile App form, which is great for students like me who are always on the go and never know what assignments are due when.
I wish I could upload assignments from my Android Tablet or iPhone, but I guarantee that that specific feature is in the works.
I use BlackBoard mobile on my Android tablet and my iPhone to check when assignments are due, make posts on class forums, and even take tests or quizzes on the go.
