Apart from a few glitches we have been quite satisfied with the suite of Learning Objects tools.  In terms of alternatives the Blackboard tools were not even a starter as they lack some of the fundamental features expected – The most significant being the lack of sharing outside the specific course site.  You cannot share even between two or more course sites nor especially with external users such supervisors in placements. This alone was enough to discount them but I remember there being other issues as well.  I did raise this issue with Blackboard who told me it was not even on their road map to update them and they considered them to be assignment tools within a course site.

Since learning objects are well integrated with blackboard we have not looked at other external providers.

I remember now that there was also no facility to export wikis and blogs to a single web page – this is something else we need because where they are being marked as assignments we require them to go through Turnitin for plagiarism checking and Turnitin Grademark for marking. 

The added advantage of LO is the built in podcasting tool which allows the recording of a podcast episode directly through blackboard.

If it aint broke why try and fix it!

Clive Richards