When community feedback sits, and sits, and sits
In Part 1 of this series, I made a point of giving credit where it is due. The Blackboard Idea Exchange is a genuine community resource. The voting and commenting infrastructure works. The community shows up and does the work. Some ideas do move through the pipeline and become real features. That is all true, and I meant every word of it.
Now let us talk about what is also true.
Of the 6,711 ideas currently in the Idea Exchange, 4,050 of them — just over 60 percent — carry the status “Future consideration.” That is the single largest category in the platform, dwarfing every other status by a wide margin. “Unlikely to implement” comes in second at 1,232. “Planning to implement,” the designation that indicates a genuine commitment, applies to just 307 ideas — less than 5 percent of the total.
Where 6,711 Idea Exchange Requests Currently Stand
Status breakdown across all active ideas, sorted by volume
“Future consideration” sounds reasonable in the abstract. Of course not every idea can be built right now. Roadmaps have constraints. Engineering resources are finite. I understand all of that. But “future consideration” as a practical matter has become the Idea Exchange’s version of a holding cell. A place where requests go to wait indefinitely, where the clock runs without any visible countdown, and where the community has no reliable signal about whether the idea is genuinely being weighed or has simply been shelved with a polite label.
When 60 percent of your platform’s ideas are in a single vague status category, the status has lost its meaning.
The scope of what is waiting becomes clearer when you look at the vote counts. Among those 4,050 “Future consideration” ideas:
- 99 have cleared 100 votes
- 25 have more than 200 votes
- 10 have more than 300 votes
The top ten “Future consideration” ideas, sorted by community support, are not obscure edge-case requests. They are foundational instructional workflow needs:
The Top 10 “Future Consideration” Ideas, by Vote
Every one of these is a foundational instructional workflow request, not an edge case
Every single one of those is a capability that was either present in Blackboard Original, is a standard feature in competing LMS platforms, or both. The community has not invented exotic wishlist items here. They have documented a gap between what Ultra promised and what Ultra delivers, and they have voted on those gaps with remarkable consistency over multiple years.
The age of some of these requests is where the frustration becomes fully justified. The Idea Exchange’s own data shows that the majority of its ideas were submitted starting in 2022 — which makes sense, as that was when Ultra adoption accelerated across the sector. That means many of the top-voted “Future consideration” ideas have been sitting in that status for approaching four years.
The request to attach a rubric to a gradebook-created column (366 votes, ID LEARNU-I-301) was submitted on August 23, 2022. As of this writing, it remains “Future consideration.” One community member left this comment in August 2026:
“Good Morning Blackboard Idea Exchange Administrators. Today is August 12, 2026. The original request for this went out August 23, 2022. It has been four years of asking for a rubric that we can save as a pdf and print out neatly. Can someone on your side of the table provide us with an update or explanation?” — G.S.
When a community member has to structure their comment like a formal meeting agenda notice — “Today is August 12, 2026. The original request went out August 23, 2022” — that is not venting. That is someone who has been counting.
On the request for HTML editing capability in the text editor (318 votes), community member J.L. wrote in January 2026: “Bumping this thread, as it’s now 2026, and this request has been hanging out there for 2 1/2 years.” And on that same thread, instructor R.G. described the real-world academic cost:
“It looks so embarrassing and unprofessional to show a session heading as ‘The origin of Homo sapiens’ without italicizing Homo sapiens, or ‘Bipedalism in Paranthropus species’ without italicizing Paranthropus. I raised this issue perhaps two years ago, and nothing has been done as of August 2026, and the new academic year is rapidly approaching. Very frustrating.”
These are not dramatic complaints. They are precise descriptions of how missing features create real professional problems for real educators. Italicizing a genus name is not a cosmetic preference in a biology course — it is academic convention. The Idea Exchange has documented it. The community has voted on it. And it sits in “Future consideration.”
What makes the “Future consideration” purgatory most troubling is when you can see the exact moment an idea was demoted into it. The request to allow instructors to view in-progress assessment attempts (388 votes, ID LEARNU-I-4167) provides a particularly clear example. In September 2025, a Blackboard employee. responded directly in the thread:
“Hi Matteo, This is one of our next up gradebook priorities. We will update here once we are ready to move this project forward.”
One month later, in October 2025, there was a follow-up from the Blackboard employee:
“Hi Matteo, This development remains one of our next up priorities. However, we don’t yet have a timeline for this work. We will update here once we are ready to move this project forward.”
The language softened noticeably between September and October — from “one of our next up gradebook priorities” to “remains one of our next up priorities” alongside “we don’t yet have a timeline.” Shortly after, the idea was moved to “Future consideration.” A community member captured the moment with admirable restraint, posting simply: “Now it has been moved to ‘Future Consideration’ 🫤”
That emoji carries a lot of meaning. The community watched something move from “priority” to “no timeline” to the holding category within the span of a few weeks. That pattern erodes trust. Not because things get deprioritized (that happens in every software development organization and always will) but because the communication around reprioritization is opaque and the landing zone is indistinguishable from abandonment.
The late penalty deduction request (379 votes, ID LEARNU-I-232) illustrates another layer of the problem: scale through idea merging. This idea, asking for automated grade penalty deductions for late submissions (a standard feature in Canvas and other platforms), was submitted in August 2022 and has since been merged with 19 other related ideas. One commenter noted exactly what that means:
“I agree, the fact that this idea dates back to Aug 10, 2022 and the last update was in October 2025. I see this idea has been merged with 19 others so that’s a bit telling. This is a feature users are asking for. Our institution is surrounded by schools that use Canvas. So many of our FT and Adjunct instructors are used to using this feature and keep asking when is Bb going to add it. This has been upvoted for a long time. Can this be added to the next Bb meeting agenda?” — V.E.
Merging related ideas is a reasonable platform mechanic. It consolidates votes and prevents fragmentation of community voice. But when a merged idea with the combined weight of 20 separate requests still does not move out of “future consideration” after four years, the merge starts to look less like organization and more like aggregation for its own sake.
The soft delete request (422 votes, ID LEARNU-I-57) has 84 comments, the highest comment count of any idea in the top tier. That volume alone is worth pausing on: 84 people took the time to engage with a thread about recoverable deletion. The community is not asking for something exotic. They are asking for an undo button that virtually every other major software platform introduced years ago. C.B. put it plainly in May 2026:
“Not just a soft delete. A literal Undo button that restores content and associated data that was accidentally deleted. Call it a granular restore button if you wish. This is expected behavior in software now. Having to restore an entire course to recover the data from a single quiz or test is bonkers and creates as many complications as it solves.”
“This is expected behavior in software now” is doing significant argumentative work in that comment. He is right. The community is not leading with edge-case requests. They are trailing the general software industry by a decade and pointing it out politely.
“Unlikely to implement” deserves its own brief accounting. The platform’s second-largest status category (1,232 ideas) is where feature requests go when Blackboard has determined they will not be built. I have no fundamental objection to a vendor saying no. Not everything can or should be built, and clarity on that is actually helpful. What is more difficult to rationalize is when high-vote ideas end up there: spell check, for instance, sits in “Unlikely to implement” with 101 votes. The platform does not currently plan to implement spell check. In a text-heavy educational tool used by thousands of instructors producing course materials, the absence of spell check is… a choice.
There is also the matter of the 140 ideas carrying the status “Follow up is needed” — a category that is vague enough to raise questions about what distinguishes it from the others and what the timeline looks like for resolution. When you are mapping your community’s feedback against a taxonomy of statuses and one of them is a passive “follow-up is needed,” the question of what is actually being tracked becomes relevant.
To be direct about what this data represents: the Idea Exchange is not failing because the community is not engaged. Ninety-two thousand votes and nearly fourteen thousand comments represent a community that is genuinely invested. The Idea Exchange is straining because the pipeline from “submitted” to “real” is not keeping pace with the input. When 60 percent of all ideas share the same vague status, and when some of the platform’s most-voted and most-commented requests have sat there for four years, the system is signaling that something structural needs to change.
The community held up their end. The question for Part 3 is what comes next.
Next in the series — Part 3: “From Feedback to Forward Motion: What Comes Next for the Idea Exchange” — five constructive steps for both Blackboard and the community to turn the Idea Exchange into the tool it has the potential to be.
Technically Yours,
The Blackboard Guru
