Students are concerned they may be outed to their peers by Blackboard

Celeste Chance, Contributing Writer

Some transgender and nonbinary students are seeking alternatives to Blackboard Learn — the course management system used by VCU and many other schools — because of worries that it may out those students to their peers.

Blackboard doesn’t allow students to use preferred names on the site; requiring legal names to be used. Students say this leaves them vulnerable when posting on discussion boards, which are used to communicate with peers, sometimes as part of class assignments.

Vice Provost and Dean of Student Affairs Reuban Rodriguez said modifications to allow  students to change their names in Blackboard could be in place for the next academic year. Blackboard is scheduled to update in May.

Students have to change their names legally for them to appear differently on Blackboard, said Eric Harvey, senior manager of learning systems for VCU Technology Services. Harvey said his department reached out to the vendor to see whether a separate name field can be used.

“It could be as simple as that,” Harvey said. “We don’t know.”

The process laid out by the Division of Student Affairs outlines two methods of name change — one for a preferred name and one for legal name changes.

Certain information systems do not support preferred names, according to DSA. Some departments, however — including Residential Life and Housing, Recreational Sports, VCUCard Office and VCU Libraries — allow students to use preferred names.  

Students who undergo a legal name change can visit Student Services Center or mail their form to Records and Registration with verification that shows their name change.

Junior Tristan Taggart — who studies political science and gender, sexuality and women’s studies — has been advocating that Blackboard allow name changes on its site since transferring to VCU in 2017. They said constantly being addressed by a name that isn’t theirs can be marginalizing and is in some ways a “violent” experience in terms of the toll it takes on them.

“I sort of figured I had to suck it up and constantly out myself to my peers,” Taggart said.

They said they’ve reached out to groups on campus and the Office of Equity and Access in pursuit of a solution. Taggart said the university’s name change policies can be confusing because they aren’t consistent across the board.

“It’s been hard for me to figure out where I’m known by which name,” Taggart said. “That hasn’t been streamlined at all.”

Some professors are using Google Classroom, a similar course management system, as an alternative to Blackboard. Among them is Myrl Beam, a gender, sexuality and women’s studies professor. After years of using only Blackboard, Beam started using Google Classroom in January of this spring semester.

“I knew [Blackboard] was problematic. I had never tried to create an alternate to it,” Beam said. “I think students in previous years have just been like, ‘Well this is what we have to deal with.’”

Beam said it shouldn’t be on faculty members to find alternative solutions. It’s an unnecessary burden, he said, and there’s no guarantee they will seek to do it at all.

“It should be a systemic solution to a systemic problem,” Beam said.

Archana Pathak, senior faculty specialist for the Division for Inclusive Excellence, will be part of a focus group that will invite students and faculty to discuss the issues with Banner, the software application that Blackboard runs under. Pathak notes one of the goals will be to create four distinct categories in Blackboard: legal name, legal gender, name of use and gender.

Pathak said part of the issue has been integrating each of VCU’s databases that collect different information from students — such as name, address and financial aid data — to work together. She will send an email out to students and faculty this month to participate in focus groups to discuss potential additions to Banner.

“It’s important for folks to know that since it has come up it’s been on the radar and I know it feels that it got lost in the fray, but it hasn’t,” Pathak said. “It’s been about getting to a place where we have the technological capacity.”