Yes blackboard is absolutely horrible. One of (many) experiences I had, was a course coordinator for a project course where students submitted a research report at the end. We needed to get the reports uploaded to turnitin through the platform, the interface for doing this was horrible enough, you essentially needed to check the reports in a big table and press upload selected to turnitin. The thing would just randomly fail and no reports would be generated. After much fiddling I found that the process failed likely (I don't quite remember how I found this) because in the background blackboard would generate a zip or tarfile and then upload that to turnitin. The thing was the VMs they seemed used were horribly under provisioned, so the zip or tar process would run out of memory and be killed. The thing was, there was no easy way of knowing how many reports reliably worked, so the solution (proposed by blackboard support) was I should just go to every report individually and upload. A process that took about 3 h because the interface was so horribly slow. Considering that I was already completely overworked (80h weeks) not a suitable solution.
Fortunately, many universities are moving to other platforms. Where I am now we use canvas, which is open source and really like night and day compared to blackboard. I also heard good things about moodle (another OSS solution).
I've used Moodle a couple of times, including building a course from scratch three months ago. It has a good feature set out of the box, has plenty of plug-ins for add-on functionality and - for me, the best thing - a really helpful and responsive user community. (See the forums [1])
Documentation is also refreshingly comprehensive and up to date.
So you are aware your dislike of Blackboard for reasons above are misplaced:
- TurnItIn is a 3rd party Blackboard extension and the school selected to use this.
- The school was also likely self hosting an under provisioned system.
I'm sure there are plenty of valid reasons for you to dislike Blackboard, but above cases are the school in question and TurnItIn.
- I know that turnitin is a 3rd party extension, however it was failing on the blackboard side if I recall correctly.
- The university was not self-hosting as far as I know. I was not in the IT department, so would not know 100%, but in my interactions with IT they said that the service was hosted by blackboard and we had limited control over the system, e.g. pretty much every issue had to be escalated to blackboard.
Fortunately, many universities are moving to other platforms. Where I am now we use canvas, which is open source and really like night and day compared to blackboard. I also heard good things about moodle (another OSS solution).