Blackboard Instructor Hack 5.5.1 + Redeem Codes

I use this app to grade homework on my iPad. It makes it possible for me to have a similar workflow to pencil and paper grading, while avoiding the headaches of keeping track of a stack of papers, which I love. I find the overall experience to be decent, with a few frustrations. First, the app needs better Apple Pencil support with palm rejection, because I constantly find myself having to erase stray marks. Which brings me to number two, switching between the pen and eraser tool takes too long, there should be a designated eraser button, and also support for the Apple Pencil double tap to switch. Finally, it should be possible to change the default pen color and size (the default size is too large), or even save multiple defaults. It should also be noted that the app attempts to “smooth” pen strokes, but often this does more harm then good, because letter shapes tend to get bungled.

There is a bug in the (otherwise okay) Blackboard web page such that I can't scroll in the grade center when viewing the web page on the iPad. Thus, I can't see the most recent homework assignment. So I am forced to use this awful app. Blackboard of course has no actual customer support, so I can't even file a bug report. I just want to be able to use the browser version! The app is almost completely useless. There is no way to batch download homework assignments. Apparently Blackboard thinks you should do your grading in their app, rather than using one of the (many, much better) dedicated drawing/PDF annotation apps available on the iPad. The grades page will only show you the grades for one assignment at a time. There is no way to see all grades for a single student, let alone a chart like the browser's grade center. It insists on showing grades in the order the assignment was uploaded. This is essentially a random order--I have to hunt and search if what I want is a particular student's grade. Please, please, please fix the bug in the browser version so that the grade center works on mobile devices, so I don't have to use this awful, awful app!

The interface could definitely be easier to use, particularly when trying to look at discussion boards… There’s no clear way to tell whether you have unread posts, the mechanism for going into replies is not intuitive, etc.

From the course selection list, the app doesn’t allow you to look at your upcoming courses. While I was trying to design my summer course using the web interface, I was unable to use the app to see what the app experience would be like. That seems fairly ridiculous... to have to wait until my course is officially available to students to know what that course will look like on their mobile devices.

There’s no mechanism to use voice or video from your phone to record anything for the class and post it. It’s wildly frustrating to be on the same device as the app record a video or a voice memo to my students, then have to download it to a computer to upload to my Blackboard class rather than just use the app that’s on the same device I’m recording with. Students should be able to do the same to make it as convenient as possible for them to engage with me and one another.

How can you tell me with a straight face that this is an app geared towards instructors—when it doesn’t even allow instructors the minimal functionality of being able to see (much less edit) student grades??!!!

Sorry, but a classroom application for instructors that has no functionality for viewing student grades is an exercise in uselessness that reflects complete incompetence on the part of the developers. Has even one of these developers ever taught a course? I’d vote ‘no’ on the lack of any real functionality in this app.

This app is complete garbage. Junk. Don’t even waste your time on it if you are an instructor. I don’t understand, in this day and age, how Blackboard could be so backwards as to release this app. Game developers are absolutely pushing the limits of mobile technology with advanced 3D rendering, etc., and Blackboard doesn’t have the competence to even be able to let an instructor see grades on a mobile. How embarrassing for the developers. More or less an advertisement of how incompetent they are at creating even a halfway decent app.

Logging in with a password manager is buggy (won't work the first time you try to use iCloud Keychain) and doesn't work at all with Lastpass (even when you manually search for the matching item) -1 star. Otherwise this would have been 4 stars.

For me as this app has very little utility. The primary thing I check Blackboard for with any frequency is to find out whether any students are badly behind and notify those students. For this the app is pretty useless. For autograde items and items which I have already graded, I can see the average, and for assignments I can see the grades for individual students. There's no way to see individual student grades on quizzes. I can see individual student grades on assignments, but I have to remember which students missed each assignment to see if it was the same students who missed other assignments.
Needless to say that doesn't work very well.

Please please give us a version of Grade Center that works on mobile, even if it is read-only. Or a Predict app, or a version of Predict that doesn't take 30 seconds to start up.

The web version is quite difficult for graders to annotate the HWs and assignments. But the app is way worse because of reasons like:
a. Am I grading the latest attempt of a particular student or the first attempt. Like the web blackboard, app doesn’t default to show only the latest attempt or give an option to enable in the settings.
b. The latest update has screwed one thing that was working till the last update i.e. loading PDFs. The PDFs just don’t load. You get a green tick mark but the PDF is blank

Fixing these two things should be a priority in my opinion, then you can move on to have a full fledged application that has all the functionality of the web version but in a much easily accessible way. If you just focus on the functionality and in the process make the mobile application less user friendly, it is going to be a terrible experience.

I have seen reviews from 2years back with the same things that the app is not able to deliver and yet things have not changed. In my opinion as of 2021, even the 3.6 average rating is wrong. I would have given a 0 but here we are with a 1 star. Either the development has completely stopped or they just don’t care or they are not capable of doing it. An application that is used globally to help educate students: I expect better from you.

This has been a worthwhile app for professors to leave feedback on student work. BUT the new release now completely frustrates me when I use the apple Pen (on my iPad) because I have to wait a second before each mark. When I try to write there is a stall and it seems to want me to zoom in or select something. I’m just trying to write in text and lift my pen between letters??? This is now beyond frustrating. It now takes several seconds TO WRITE ONE WORD. A busy professor does not have time for this.

Also could the developers consider adding a 2 finger scroll so that I do not have to lose my writing function and reopen that every time I need to move lower in the page?

This app got my hopes up for nothing. I thought I could grade assignments from my iPad and be able to stay more on top of my grading. I can only grade certain things but then it never lets me post the grade. App keeps crashing every time I try to do something. And what’s with this “I have to be in the web browser” to grade quizzes and stuff? This is nuts considering I have yet to be able to effectively grade anything on the web browser for the iPad. It doens’t matter if I use safari or google chrome. Blackboard Ultra does not let me grade assignments. It doesn’t show the whole screen and doesn’t scroll for me. So I thought the app would be a better alternative. Man was I wrong. Blackboard is a joke of a system. Please update the software so that it doesn’t crash and I can actually do my job. Thanks. :-)

I really need something that allows me to grade quizzes, exam essays, and discussion board postings on an iPad. This app does none of those things. How a company that is raking in millions of dollars in profits each year can release an app without any of the functionality that instructors demand is unimaginable. On top of that, there is still no way to access a course grade book and (thanks to how Blackboard is set up) incredibly difficult to do from the web browser on a mobile platform. If Blackboard spent 1/10 of the money that they do on promotions (such as the free lunch they provided for the faculty at my institution) actually developing their products, they might have something that is both functional and pleasant to work with. Instead what we get is a ineloquent product and a half-baked app.

I can’t tell you in words how much I despise Blackboard’s apps. It’s almost as though they don’t understand how their own software works, or what teachers have to do. But that doesn’t matter when most of the time they won’t log in anyway. Now, to make matters worse, the online access is harder to use because “Box” dropped some functionality and they depend on Box rather than their own interface. I strongly encourage Blackboard to get rid of all of these apps and start over with a team of instructors that can help you understand what we need and an app development company that knows how to actually build usable apps. Why can’t you be more like Canvas, which I use at another school? It is like you’re stuck in the late 80s or early 90s with your tech and that doesn’t seem to bother you.