Educational software lock-in

I'm a student at an institution which uses educational software provided by Blackboard. Blackboard is very successful eLearning system which is widely used. Of course, it's also a web-app, and it suffers from many of the typical web-app failures: it's slow, insecure, integrates badly into the operating system and provides a generally poor user interface. One of my pet peeves is the unbelievable number of clicks I require to achieve simple things like getting a course overview, or managing assignments which need to be handed in or retrieved. Web applications can be frustrating.

It's very hard to judge how heavily Blackboard is to blame these failures, and how heavily other factors (it's a web-app, and a university is administering it...) weigh. From the point of view of a computer science student, it's frustrating that such a seemingly simple purpose - I use it as a glorified message board - is bogged down by so many features with so many resultant bugs, and so many resultant performance issues. It doesn't make things any simpler either.

I also work for the university writing webapps, so I often get the inside story from fellow developers, specifically two roommates which try to implement work-arounds and generally improve blackboard's embedding into the RuG. That's pretty much required because of the many problems blackboard suffers. I sometimes wish we could just dump blackboard and choose something else:

There's got to be something else out there that's better than this, right?

Of course, it's not so easy - by now, so much work has been done customizing blackboard to our situation, and so many teachers and students have finally begun to understand this particular piece of software, that we really can't make the switch easily at all. It's as Coding Horror says: "Once you've performed extensive software customizations, extracting yourself from that software becomes nearly impossible." As if this weren't bad enough, blackboard has confusing patents, and is willing to (ab?)use them to stifle competition. There have been many sites which try to illustrate how meaningless blackboard's patent is, but the award goes to Blackboard itself: FAQ on Understanding the Blackboard Patent. It's completely meaningless! I have my doubts "How do you read a patent?" qualifies as a frequently asked question, but fortunately, blackboard also includes such helpful sections as:

Is Blackboard suggesting that all course management systems are covered by the Blackboard patent?
Absolutely not. Blackboard is not claiming to have invented or to have received a patent on all e-Learning or on all course management systems ever created. Blackboard didn't invent just any course management system, but the system claimed in the patent, which has achieved great commercial success. Another common misperception is that Blackboard is claiming to have invented or has claims over a broad range of standard e-learning tools standing alone, like discussion boards and chat rooms, which is also not the case.

Oh, OK, that's fine then, the patent only covers the specific systems which it claims to cover. Gee, happy we cleared that up. If you're so inclined, you can read the patent application itself. Claim 1 is short and easy to understand - once you've worked your way through the convoluted grammar anyways. It's simply taking a well-known authorization scheme (users with roles) and applying that to a specific case (courses, students, instructors, administrators etc).

The whole patent issue is bad, their software is not of high quality (though it does have many features), but neither would pose a problem if you could switch.

Lock-in is evil.