Blackboard Virtual Classroom is used in many highschools throughout the nation today. The application allows student and teacher to interact through the web. Blackboard does infact provide many of the features required by the specification but does lack a few as well. One feature the application allows for is out of the classroom lectures, where the teacher is able to broadcast his or her voice and video camera feed through the web.

Overall, Blackboard provides a strong basis for a virtual classroom and provides the necessary features to educate over the web.

Good Features:

• Controls for allowing individual users certain acceses/restrictions
• Simple question queue where students are able to ask questions and the teacher is able to answer them at his discretion
• User list that shows all participants in the classroom and their respective role, i.e, student, assistant, teacher
• Capability for lecture slides as well as teacher video and audio feed on the same screen
• Whiteboard feature allows for cutting, pasting, and moving items on the virtual whiteboard. Free drawing is also available
• Groub browser feature allows a classroom to collectively browse the internet, i,e, watch youtube videos, use a web-app

Bad Features:

• GUI is somewhat hard to navigate and many features are jumbled together instead of separate buttons for each
• Requires a separate Blackboard account (not student ID) to register and login with
• Closed source, so there are no third party extensions to expand application capabilities

Missing Features:

• No way to represent different layers on the whiteboard
• Missing the ability to poll students on level of understanding
• No way to expand a topic on a lecture slide for more detail
• Switching between lecture slides and virtual whiteboard is not straight forward and requires multiple button presses
• Lecture slides cannot be used to write on directly
• Saving and opening previous whiteboard drawings is not possible directly through the application