One of my mentors created Blackboard. It used to be very very good, but he sold it to private equity, and they immediately fired all of the customer support and developers, 3xd prices overnight leading to the 'blackboard sucks' problem. This gave the opening for Canvas to eventually come on to the scene and dominate.

I believe Canvas was also sold to private equity pretty recently too. https://www.instructure.com/press-release/instructure-to-be-...

My wife and I each have to use it as we're both following an online master's at the same university... it's definitely gone downhill (compared to the days where I originally used it ~20 yrs ago in college; tracker-riddled, slow); surprisingly, a recent change made it so that you can only attend online lessons in Chrome (haven't had time to see if this is just a user-agent thing).

..and be acquired by PE so the cycle can continue.. https://www.instructure.com/press-release/instructure-to-be-... sigh. Barbarians at the gate probably didn't double down on security