Every now and then I run into a colleague at a conference, usually someone who made the jump to Canvas or Brightspace a few years back, and I can tell within two minutes whether they’re happy about it. Some are. Plenty aren’t. And when they start venting, I mostly just listen, nod, and quietly appreciate what I have.
I’m a Blackboard admin. Have been for a long time. And right now, in this particular moment in the LMS landscape, I’m genuinely glad about that. Here’s why.
Three years of customer-driven development, and the receipts are there if you look.
This isn’t a talking point I’m parroting from a sales deck. It’s something I’ve watched play out release cycle after release cycle. Consistently over the past three years, Blackboard has developed more features and shipped more meaningful improvements based on direct customer feedback than any other LMS on the market. Not incremental UI tweaks. Actual functional changes that reflect what admins and faculty need and asked for.
Many of my Blackboard admin colleagues will recognize this pattern: you flag something in a community thread or raise it on a call or create an idea on the idea exchange, and somewhere down the road it shows up in a release. That feedback loop exists, and it works. Is it perfect? No. But it’s real, and the same cannot be said for every competitor. Canvas admins I know have watched feature requests sit untouched for years while the platform prioritizes what it wants to build. An example of this is the quiz tool that has been in development for years and still, according to sources, has frequent problems. That’s a frustrating place to be when you’re the one fielding faculty complaints.
When I deploy a Microsoft integration, it works. Apparently that’s not universal.
Our Microsoft integrations in Blackboard just works. Teams, (and the broader M365 ecosystem) is connected, reliable, not a weekly adventure in troubleshooting. I don’t think about them much, which is precisely the point. A good integration is one you forget about after you set it up. If I have problems, there are specific team members within Blackboard I know can help me find a solution and are willing to do so. They are just a chat or email away.
I can’t say the same for what I hear from Canvas admins. The chatter is constant—authentication breaking, sync issues, edge cases that become institution-wide incidents. I’m not cherry-picking anecdotes; this comes up repeatedly in cross-platform admin conversations. When your integration stack is unreliable, it doesn’t just affect IT. It erodes faculty trust in the entire platform. Moreover, Canvas admins I’ve spoken with have no direct person to talk to about the integration within Instructure. Every broken Teams link is a support ticket and a tiny withdrawal from the goodwill account an admin needs to keep filled.
Blackboard’s integration reliability doesn’t get enough credit. I’ll give it some here.
Weekly calls with the product development team. No, really. Weekly.
I want to be precise about this because it’s genuinely unusual: Blackboard schedules weekly calls with client institutions that include members of the actual product development team. Not account managers. Not tier-one support. The people building the platform.
Canvas doesn’t do this. They don’t have a structured regular cadence of customer-facing calls with product teams involved. D2L does hold client calls, but monthly, and the product development team is typically absent from those conversations. You’re talking to people who can take notes and pass feedback up a chain. That’s not nothing, but it’s not the same thing.
What Blackboard has built is direct access, on a regular schedule, to the people who can actually act on what you say. If you ask anyone who has worked outside higher education, that is rare in enterprise software. That is why Blackboard keeps winning awards in this space-not because of marketing, but because the institutions using the platform have a genuine line to the people building it. You wonder why the customer feedback loop I mentioned earlier actually closes? This is the mechanism.
AI that’s built around the instructor, not around the press release.
Every LMS vendor is in a race right now to plant their AI flag. I get it. The pressure is real, and sadly the investment firms expect it. What separates Blackboard’s approach is that the AI tools being delivered positively impact student engagement and save faculty time while keeping the instructor at the center of the AI implementation. That last part matters more than most vendors acknowledge.
Faculty in higher education are not looking to be automated around. The ones who resist AI tools usually do so because they feel like the tool is making decisions that should be theirs. Blackboard’s approach doesn’t do that. AI tools in Blackboard surface information, flag at-risk students, and reduce administrative friction—but the instructor remains the decision-maker. That’s the right design philosophy, and it’s one that’s going to determine which institutions actually adopt these tools versus which ones deploy them to a folder nobody opens.
Rushing AI features to market without that instructional philosophy baked in is a mistake. Some platforms are making it. Blackboard isn’t.
Look, I’m not here to tell you Blackboard is perfect. It isn’t, and if you’ve read this blog for any length of time, you know I’ll say so plainly when something falls short. But right now, in a landscape where the alternatives have real, documented problems—with integrations, with customer access, with AI direction, and with a lack of listening to users—I’ll take what we have.
The support queue on the other side looks long. I’m fine where I am.
Technically Yours,
The Blackboard Guru
