Blackboard vs. moodle: Comparing user experience of learning management systems

Learning management systems are becoming ubiquitous technology adopted at institutions of higher learning. Before these systems can be considered effective the user experience must be studied and analyzed to provide the optimum solution to meet pedagogical needs of both faculty and students. This study compared the user experience between the leading proprietary solution, Blackboard, and the leading open source solution, Moodle. We established a control group that only used the proprietary solution and two study groups, a faculty group and a student group that used the open source solution, but had previous experience with the proprietary solution. We used online surveys to compare the user experience of the basic functionality of each system such as communication tools, student-student interaction tools, student-instructor interaction tools. The study was conducted during the Fall 2006 semester at California State University Monterey Bay and included five upper division courses with the learning management systems used as an adjunct to a traditional face-to-face delivery modality.