Is "Blackboard" accessible from Ubuntu?

[vasa1]

From what I gather

Blackboard is something that many educational institutions in the "West" rely on
For years, it was accessible only via Internet Explorer but recently seems to work with Firefox as well

Does anyone know if Blackboard is now "OS-agnostic"? It looks like users of MS Windows and Macs can access it. Anyone know whether an Ubuntu user can do so without resorting to Wine or equivalents.

[caffeinatedev]

I can use both the Firefox browser and Ubuntu 12.04 on Blackboard without any issues. ;)

Just out of curiosity, what school are you attending?

[V for Vincent]

Works perfectly under Firefox, works near-perfectly under Chromium for me.

[vasa1]

I can use both the Firefox browser and Ubuntu 12.04 on Blackboard without any issues. ;)

Just out of curiosity, what school are you attending?
I'm past the age of "learning" ;)

I used to come across complaints in the past about Blackboard and Chrome and was curious.

[drawkcab]

Blackboard runs better on Chrome than on Firefox for me. Firefox is sluggish and always screws up the spreadsheet cells which I guess you only use if you are a faculty member.

[Frogs Hair]

Access is no problem from Ubuntu . I can check for assignments, other class preparation requirements and student email. The instructors that have been aware open source office programs have suggested not using them and will drop a full grade for formatting errors so I dare not use Libre Office. You have to check with instructors for their preference.

[Mr.Plex]

Access is no problem from Ubuntu . I can check for assignments, other class preparation requirements and student email. The instructors that have been aware open source office programs have suggested not using them and will drop a full grade for formatting errors so I dare not use Libre Office. You have to check with instructors for their preference.

Sometimes I think its just people who don't know how to use them correctly that ruin it for everybody.
"Why did i recieve a F on muh paper teach?"
"because your margins were off"
"Oh weird they used to work in word but I just started using libreoffice"

[drawkcab]

I brought this up to the "World Campus" at Penn State. They basically shrugged and, instead of adding OpenOffice support, kept on requiring that every student buy MS Office.

[gbswales]

I think the main question is answered in that Blackboard is entirlely web based and is compatible with firefox and chrome. It is true to say Bb did have issues on Chrome in the early days but as long as your school keep their Blackboad installation up to date you should not expect problems. The problem is that updating to a new version involves a day or two of downtime and many colleges like mine will only do this during the summer vacation which means at times they maybe several versions behind blackboard which has four scheduled update each year.

On the issue of open source office suites I think the main problem here is that many academic staff have very poor software skills. As little time ago as last year I came across students being told that they must save Word DOCX files in the older DOC format. The instructors hadn't updated their software (free to them) because they dont like change and didn't know that Office 2007 has filters that will open 2010 files - mind you I found two who were still using Office 2003 and one still using office 2000!!

If they dont know how to deal with slightly different formats in the same product then they are going to be completely phased by a format they have no knowledge of. However if an open source product doesn't deliver formats which meet layout requirements, then that is a different matter - or more likley due to the student's lack of knowledge on how to use the open source version. If students have problems like this in Word then our support team are equipped to help them, but not so with libre and other offerings.

I know that sometimes 3rd party tools used by universities for plagiarism checking do not accept by open source products, these have elaborate precautions built in to recognise cheats who try using character substitution. However as far as I know these services do accept RTF, TXT and PDF (text not scanned) file types so the student could use one of these instead. RTF is a very interchangable format between word processing files. Event the delightfully quirky WordPerfect (if that is still around)can save in these formats

[vasa1]

I brought this up to the "World Campus" at Penn State. They basically shrugged and, instead of adding OpenOffice support, kept on requiring that every student buy MS Office.

So the "strings attached" are still there.

[vasa1]

I think the main question is answered in that Blackboard is entirlely web based and is compatible with firefox and chrome. ...
Hi!
I came across your answer of Jan 13 over here (http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/chrome/blackboard/chrome/tMU8vqqWjhg/6wgobcVNPowJ) where you wrote, "For a long time Blackboard was only compatible with Interent Explorer, firefox and Safari on Macs."
Since I have no knowledge about Blackboard directly, I got the impression, perhaps wrongly and not just from your post but several others, that there was not just a browser limitation but also an OS one. Of course, that was a while ago (when Chrome's version was still in the single digit range and I was posting frequently in that forum).

[gbswales]

Hi!
I came across your answer of Jan 13 over here (http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!searchin/chrome/blackboard/chrome/tMU8vqqWjhg/6wgobcVNPowJ) where you wrote, "For a long time Blackboard was only compatible with Interent Explorer, firefox and Safari on Macs."
Since I have no knowledge about Blackboard directly, I got the impression, perhaps wrongly and not just from your post but several others, that there was not just a browser limitation but also an OS one. Of course, that was a while ago (when Chrome's version was still in the single digit range and I was posting frequently in that forum).

As far as OS is concerned BB has in my life usage of it been compatible with Windows and Macs (no one ever asked about linux so I just dont know) The problem we had with OS is that some third party plug in's were not compatible with Mac OS and the matter became further complicated when IE for the Mac was witdrawn as Blackboard was optmised for IE - that is not to say it didnt work in other browsers 99% of the time and any issues usually revolved around Java etc. It was compatible with firefox until a couple of years back when they, like chrome, moved to a rapid development model when things started to get broken before Bb could patch the problem. Since the release of 9.1 it has been much more compatible with these rapid developments.

There are however so many other issues involved - do users keep browsers and things like java up to date - i know a lot of young people turn off automatic updating in case it interferes with games. Also it is reliant on the insitution being able to update Blackboard which cannot be done without some downtime. So even though blackboard may quickly fix an issue it can be a couple of months before an institution has a window in which to apply it.

The price of multiple browser choice and improved features is that occasionally some website will not render properly in it because something fundamental in the browser has changed and this has over time affected several websites I use, not just Blackboard which is itself just a website with a database behind it. In our institution we have always made sure that students are able to use open access computers which we ensure stay compatible but with the increasing tendancy for students to use their own laptops it is quite difficult to maintain 100% reliability. We cannot be sure that they havent installed a cookie blocker for example - because blackboard uses session cookies to maintain login.

With a student population of 12,000 we only get a small number of problems each year and usually we are able to resolve these quickly.