Currently there are two main educational sites used in the college arena: Blackboard and Livetext.  I have used both several times in the past, and am currently using both in different Eastern Michigan courses.  Personally, I cannot stand either of them.  Livetext is a nightmare to submit any project or paper on, and Blackboard hardly works the majority of the time.  It is extremely difficult to communicate with professors through both sites, and every professor I have had just uses email instead of communicating with students through the website.  Livetext provides the tools to edit writing, such as font and size, but Blackboard does not; however, Blackboard is easier to use, while Livetext makes building a house with no tools look easy.

College students NEED better educational resources.  Most college databases are horribly organized and a headache to use even with library help.  The educational websites available are something out of the late nineties, and hinder more than help students.  I often wonder why Eastern bothers with the online sites at all when it would much easier to just make it a normal class.  Online courses are a common and accepted normality in university course offerings, but the programs used for online classes are so poor that they seldom make up for the time saved.  As a college student, I can say that we need better online programs.  We need sites that are easy to navigate and help enhance our education, rather than hinder it with a million steps just to submit a paper.  We need accessibility to our classmates and our professors through the site, and it would help to have tutoring available when it’s 3 am and things still aren’t making sense.  There is no greater fear for a college student than having a final the next day, and still not understanding the material one bit.  We need an online program that allows for teachers to teach, but still allows students to learn; not one or the other like it is now.  We need the technology to reach us and be made for our educational needs.  Above all, we need it to be college student-friendly, meaning FREE, because there are few college students that can afford to pay $75 dollars a semester to use the program (i.e. Livetext).  (It doesn’t hurt if the site looks really sweet too, because that draws in all the video game fanatics).

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This entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 at 10:20 pm and is filed under Education, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.