Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Notes on Bb Conference Call - 1/8/2008

Red - Greater interest to Faculty
Blue - My additional comments

Attended:

Danville, Germanna, J. Sargeant Reynolds, John Tyler, Lord Fairfax, Northern, Patrick Henry, Piedmont, System Office, Thomas Nelson, Tidewater, Virginia Highlands, Virginia Western, Wytheville
Did not attend:

Blue Ridge, Central, Dabney, Eastern Shore, Mountain Empire, New River, Paul D. Camp, Rappahannock, Southside, Southwest

Overview:

Our focus during the first few weeks of the semester is on performance. We had some fairly significant slowness on Monday, but things have generally improved through the week as we have implemented additional tuning. As of this writing, Monday 14th, which is the first day for NVCC is passing off smoothly aside from some problems specific to MECC, with as many as 1.9 million hits/hour.

On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we had over 22 million hits each day. This represents 10 million more hits per day than our Fall peak and is over double our peak from the same time last year. This is obviously an extremely significant increase in traffic.

We identified the ‘What’s new” module as a source of database issues and we have disabled it.

Blackboard has release a service pack for 7.3, which has performance improvements and we intend to implement as soon as possible after testing. They have also released 8.0, but we have no plans currently to go to that version.

The course migration completed in about two weeks despite some problems over the break. Generally this has been smooth, but there have been some courses with issues that needed resolving.

Blackboard 6 is still up at http://bb6.vccs.edu/. There are 4 CPUs assigned to this at the database level. However, we plan to turn Blackboard 6 off on January 25.
An issue was identified with the Chat Server. This was resolved later on Tuesday.

Question: Is the Home page tool turned off?
Answer: No, but make sure the Roster is turned on in the class.

Question: Any sign of a Quick enroll feature?
Answer: No, but check out: http://learn.vccs.edu/bbcswebdav/users/wccartd/pub/quickEnroll.html -- we could probably do some more sophisticated things with GreaseMonkey given time, but this helps. If you add &userName=yourusername to the end of the quick enroll script, it will default to your username.

Question: Are the utility tools e.g. batch availability available in bb7?
Answer: Batch availability can be done in the web UI.

Question: What about Bb6 classes with final incompletes?
Answer: Blackboard 7 is our production system now. Students should not be using Blackboard 6.

Question: Quotas? Those emails are a real pain.
Answer: Ain’t they just? There are two quotas in Blackboard – a soft quota simply generates a warning. We have increased this to just over 1 GB. The hard quota is currently 2GB. Strategies to manage significant file content include:

1. Identify ways to reduce file size, e.g post PDF rather than Powerpoint, reduce image sizes, and generally use compressed formats. This benefits students as well.

2. Use the Content System. We can increase quotas to meet needs on the content system and content can be shared across courses.

3. Store files on college servers, linking to them from Blackboard

We will discuss further with AS & R. If, despite the above measures being taken, a quota needs to be increased, that may be possible.

Question: It appears that .mht files on content system became corrupted during the migration
Answer: We can look at this. Please file a ticket.

Question: Getting outage page sometimes. Slowness, etc.
Answer: Please add to Ticket #91486 for any performance issues with Blackboard 7. The outage page may appear when an application server is bounced, but we are still investigating.

Question: Can we have the eportfolio functionality on Blackboard?
Answer: There’s a major bug with the permissions on ePortfolios, but that aside we do not have a great deal of faith in Blackboard’s implementation of ePortfolios and feel that alternatives may well be more viable.
Question: What about faculty being able to combine enrollments from multiple classes into one.
Answer: Will investigate. Might not be technically possible.

I am currently able to do these combinations for faculty. If you need assistance please call me (2807).
Question: is there a way to alter batch individual availability within courses?
Answer: Not at the moment
Additional Notes:
We plan on implementing Domain-related administrative changes after Tuesday, 1/15. Make sure all courses are appropriately categorized.

We plan on turning off of Blackboard 6 on January 25.
We have been alerted to a security issue with WebDAV for the content system and will be turning off this functionality until we can implement SSL. A longer separate communication will be forthcoming.

Notes on Bb Conference Call - 1/15/2008

Red - Greater interest to Faculty
Blue - My additional comments

Attended:

Blue Ridge, Central, Danville, Germanna, J. Sargeant Reynolds, John Tyler, Lord Fairfax, Northern, Piedmont, System Office, Southside, Southwest, Thomas Nelson, Tidewater, Virginia Highlands, Virginia Western,

Did not attend:

Dabney, Eastern Shore, Mountain Empire, New River, Patrick Henry, Paul D. Camp, Rappahannock, Wytheville

Overview and preliminary remarks

As per previous communications, performance has gradually improved after a bit of a shaky start, and Monday 14th generally went very well. It was our busiest day of the year so far with over 27 million hits, with a peak per hour of 1.9 million hits. A lot of these are images attached to page loads, so some statistics related to distinct sessions and user logins is attached.

We plan on implementing Domain-related administrative changes after Tuesday, 1/15. Make sure all courses and organizations are appropriately categorized as soon as possible. Review the recording of this session for screen captures of how to do this.
We plan on turning off of Blackboard 6 on January 25.

We have been alerted to a security issue with WebDAV for the content system and will be turning off this functionality until we can implement SSL. A separate communication will be forthcoming, but this will be done on Friday, 18th January.

Question: The problem with Wimba announcements—is there any way to prevent it?
Answer: We will follow up with Wimba but at the moment they are acknowledging it as a known bug. It is related to the WYSIWYG editor (and Internet Explorer I think). Turning off the WYSIWYG editor will prevent it happening.


Question:Having a problem with respondus – “cannot be verified or opened”
Answer: Check that the setting is for Blackboard 7.x May need to reinstall. Otherwise, please file a ticket.

Question:Having problems with Vista and the discussion board.
Answer: General rule of thumb is to turn off the WYSIWYG editor and see if that addresses the problem. Also check Java and any related security settings.

Question: Transferring files from Wimba in Blackboard 6 is tedious.
Answer: You can grab all the files in a Voice Board in one Export operation.
Question: When taking a test, the computer slows to a crawl with one character at a time coming in to the answer field.
Answer: Probably computer or browser specific. Please file a ticket, but review OS, etc.

Question
: Dates of availability in announcements and chat don’t seem to work.
Answer: See ticket #91347
Question: How do you categorize courses and organizations?
Answer: In the System Admin control panel, find the courses you are seeking to categorize, e.g. with a search like “VH2 SP08”. Then go to the bottom of the page and choose Show All. Then go to the bottom of the page and choose Select All to check all the checkboxes. Then choose the Availability button at the top of the page.

Comment: Quick enroll is a bit of a pain.
Answer: See last week’s notes for an improvement to the bookmarklet, plus also get the Enrollment bookmarklet to facilitate unenrolling: http://learn.vccs.edu/bbcswebdav/users/wccartd/pub/quickEnroll.html.

Question: Had a couple of reports of items being posted, but that subsequently disappeared.
Answer: Please get us details if possible, but theorize that it could be related to performance and server bounces, which have significantly reduced since last week.

This may be related to how often your browser is set to check for a new page. Adjust how often to update stored pages in cache (Temporary Internet files)

Question: Students are confused by the discussion board calendar thing.
Answer: What discussion board calendar thing?

Question: Are there archives of Spring 2008 courses yet?
Answer: No, not yet. Will start on the evening of Thursday, 1/17.
Comment: Inez Farrell has files of incompletes from Fall 2007 that she is happy to share with Blackboard administrators. Please contact her for your file. Note that those with access to SIS Query should be able to use the VX_INCOMPLETE_GRADES report.