'Optimised Blackboard'; how first year students created their own pseudo-LMS

CONTEXT: Learning Management Systems (LMS) provide a mechanism for academic teaching staff to interact with students and upload learning content. In 2020, a group of first-year undergraduate engineering students at an Australian regional university constructed 'Optimised Blackboard'— a student-managed psuedo-LMS hosted on the popular gaming chat app Discord. 'Optimised Blackboard' provided a forum for student discussion, as well as a refined and consistent library of essential course content. At its peak, Optimised Blackboard had nearly 500 first-year students enrolled. PURPOSE OR GOAL: In this paper, we investigate and discuss the motivations of the developers of 'Optimised Blackboard' and reasons for the relative success of this tool. We were particularly interested in; how and why the site came to exist, how it was managed, concerns about academic integrity/assignment posting/copyright and why it was ultimately discontinued, what lessons from this could be learned to improve the 'officially sanctioned' LMS, if any, and the lasting legacy of this tool and subsequent uptake of Discord for teaching in first year courses at this University. APPROACH OR METHODOLOGY/METHODS: In this work we will refer to qualitative interview and survey data from the developers and users of the site to address our research questions. ACTUAL OR ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES: Meeting students 'where they are' and enabling autonomy over their own learning are important factors in engagement with a content-delivery platform. These, as well as the ease-of-use of the Discord-based solution compared to the 'official' LMS deployed by the institution, were motivators for the developers for Optimised Blackboard. CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS/SUMMARY: 'Optimised Blackboard' was discontinued due to perceived potential liability of the developers to its users posting copyright-infringing or plagiarised work. Given the relative success of this tool in engaging hundreds of voluntarily-enrolled students, there is substantial motivation to gain insight from these issues with the potential to support future student-run platforms and/or supplement the officially-sanctioned LMS.