Selected Minutes from LSA (Blackboard) Meeting

(I've highlighted in red area of particular interest to faculty - pay particular attention to dates and deadlines)- If you have questions or comments please click on the comment button, email, or call me.

Learning Systems Administrators Audio-Conference
3/30/2005
1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.

Attendees:
Kristy Walker - RCC, Blair Potts - SSVCC, Sadie Hastings - TCC, Jennifer Smith - CVCC, Jeff Burleson – ME, Rebecca Kittelberger – SO, Ginny Scott - GCC, Charles Boling – VHCC, Jamie Shetrone - WCC, Amy Abbott – DCC, Kristen Kelly – JTCC, Ruth Smith – TNCC, Michelle Gee – NVCC, Stacy Harris – SWVCC, David Carter-Tod, Sue Ann Curran, Matt Lawson - ITS, Mary Clare DiGiacomo - PVCC, Adam Bryant - NRCC, Jim Blackburn – BRCC, Sara Brown and George Hoffman – LFCC, Colleen Kehoe – JSRCC, Shelia Hobbs and Zakary Wade - PDCCC.

Blackboard upgrade status (David Carter-Tod and Matt Lawson)

• Hardware arrival – The IBM Blades, the hardware that will run the BB6 enviroment, arrived last week. They are being installed now and we intend to load the Blackboard software soon.


• BBTrain clean-up – We want the training and development environment to reflect the production environment. We intend to wipe it clean after the close of business on Friday. This was not a problem for anyone on the call. Only VWCC courses are being developed on that system and we have notified and worked with them separately. BBTrain will be backed up.


• Bb6 Sandbox availability – this environment will initially be used for experimenting with system settings. We do not intend to experiment with system settings on BBTrain since it is to mirror production. After that, it will be available to LSAs to experiment with and potentially show new features to early adopter faculty. Please be aware that the sandbox will not be backed up.


• Enrolling of faculty – All faculty teaching accounts from Bb 5 will be moved to Bb 6 Train to reflect production.


• Course lists will be sent on Friday to BB Admins. David will send out course lists to be migrated on Friday for each admin to review. Please return these lists to XXXXXXX by April 22. The list will consist of the original list that BB Admins sent, as well as all sp05, su05, fa05, and sp06


• After faculty have access to the training environment, they can develop courses there. We will migrate courses from BBTrain to BB6 production at the end of May. Bb Admins should provide a list of BBTrain courses to migrate in late May to XXXXXXX.


• Jim asked if there was a way to batch load courses from Blackboard 5 into Blackboard 6. There is not and we do not plan to do this, but BB Admins may do this manually for faculty. Faculty may also do their own export from BB 5.5 and import into BBTrain, as long as they have a course shell already.

Functionality Roll-Out (Sadie Hastings)

Following her post on VCCS Discuss, Sadie Hastings initiated a discussion on the availability of functionality in Bb6. The core question was whether we would use roles and allow LSAs to selectively release functionality to their colleges, e.g. to early adopters, or for training purposes. Also, there was a question of whether specific pieces of functionality, i.e.

messaging and the content system

would be available at the beginning of Fall.

The core answer is that from a technical performance perspective we need to start Fall with a "clean system" so that we can get a benchmark for performance and establish system stability with as few variables as possible. This is so that when we do add features we can see how they affect the system, and if there’s a problem, we can quickly isolate the problem.

Once we’ve established the benchmark, we can move ahead in introducing functionality, and intend to do so aggressively. The recommendation from Blackboard, and other schools who have migrated, is to be conservative when initially moving to version 6.

From a support perspective, getting over the 5.5 to 6 migration first will mean that later we will have more time to support new functionality.

Go Live Date for students: What about courses that are ongoing and courses that have continuous enrollment? They will be in progress when we go live with 6. We will need a consistent Go Live date across the system and will need to work on that.

Colleges will not have access to the Content System at the beginning of the Fall semester.

We are working with Blackboard to create a roll-out plan for the content system, and will work with the workgroup and governance groups in that process.

It was asked that we talk with the Blackboard instructors at New Horizons, so that they could make faculty aware that some of the functionality presented will be rolled out gradually. The Content System is only being shown during demonstrations and not in the workshops.

Blair asked if roles could be more aggressively pursued for the summer, and if advanced functionality could be made available on the training server so that he could work with early adopter faculty on new features. Initially the BBTrain environment will reflect the production environment and it was recommended that LSAs could use the Bb6 Sandbox to work with features that are not yet released to production.

The BBTrain server will become available to faculty by April 15. As of now, the url will still be bbtrain.vccs.edu

, but suggestions for alternatives are welcome. We will continue to use the same course naming conventions.

If faculty want to bring in their own course to BBTrain or BB6 production, they will need to export their course from Bb 5.5. The training server is for faculty who cannot wait until June 1 to start developing courses. If faculty can wait until then it is preferable for them to wait until June 1, because they don’t have to worry about the import/export process from 5 to 6.

Will we have a list of what is and what is not available, so that LSAs know how to develop their training for faculty? Sadie can modify the document to reflect the decisions of the groups.

There followed a discussion about the problem of multiple Emplids still being created and how those would be handled.

There was also a discussion about the change in the Student Email policy recently approved by the Vice-Presidents.

The meeting ended, rather abruptly, at 3:30 when we ran out of time!