All of us have to use it, and most of us hate it. X Stream is the universities answer to people that need to catch up on lectures, review them to help out with work, to get documents off tutors, look for books in the library, find information that will help them with essays, link you to your student email, and many other things I probably haven’t even found out about yet. But the question is what do most students really dislike about X Stream?

“Xstream is overly complicated, although it is good for letting students axcess their work, there are to many pages and things to click and passwords to enter.” – Student Lorelei Tomkins

From personal use of blackboard since my first year of college I have never been fond of it. I don’t actually think I used it in my entire 2 years at college due to a hate for it and lack of being taught how to go through it. The overall site seems to be very outdated and slow a lot of the time. I find that although my university tutors push us to use blackboard and submit work through it that the annoyingness of X Stream is ever increasing. The double login is the main issue students seem to have, they think that if I have logged in once, why do I have to do it again to go your courses pages? This is luckily an issue the university are looking into but due to having to shut the website down to do it, this may not come into effect until next university year.

Even though people hate X Stream the actual idea that everything for university is in one place is a good idea. From X Stream you can access the library, your coursework, and many other elements of university life through one page, so it is an ease to not have to go to one of the campuses to sort your books out or to find things out when you can do it from the ease of your own home.

“X stream is one of those essential facilities that Leeds Met students rely on. I don’t understand why the university are not acting on the issues people are currently having. I understand that under going maintenance would have a significant impact on students as the site would have to be closed for a period of time, however, I’m confident that the university are fully aware of this and are doing the best they can to sort this mess out.” – Student Erik Selby

Through talking to friends that are at other universities I have found that it is a universal problem as their universities use the same system “blackboard” so it seems that this is the only option that has been given to universities and that no other companies have stepped in to maybe help simplify the pages or even offer a completely different system.

From a personal point of view X Stream is overly complicated with way too many buttons and we are just expected to know how to use it the day we walk in to university. Does this mean that the university could put on an actual non pointless seminar in freshers week that shows you what you need to do and how the system works? Also contacting the company that produces X Stream and asking them to simplify (if this is possible) the website as students are very confused could be a good idea.