Selected Notes from the Blackboard Administrators Meeting (February 9, 2005)

Blackboard Upgrade:

• The 1st set of courses to be migrated has been identified (about 3000 courses) and the migration process is starting today. LSA’s will be getting an e-mail from ITS with any problem course ID’s encountered
• The TRAIN instance is now online, MIGRATION is online, and the PRODUCTION instance will be available around March 7th.
  

How Do we upgrade?

• Take a snapshot copy and migrate from that copy
• Take new snap shots along the way for further migrations
  

What’s the difference between Test and Development?

• Test is a clone of the production environment for pre-production testing.
• Development is an experimental environment for "fooling around".
  

Contingency and Risk Planning:

• VA Tech recently upgraded and will share their experience with us (along with other colleges). They encountered issues with hardware and performance.
• ITS has contacted consulting resources to proactively plan for the upgrade and mitigate risks.
• ITS has come up with a Plan B, which is to fall back on BB Question: When should Plan B go into effect: Consensus: After one week of down time in the summer.
• ITS has spent time identifying and evaluating other risks, as well.
• New features should be introduced as the user comfort level rises (i.e. Content System).
• The BB 5 server will be running until the end of December 2005.
• We should continue to share ideas and provide recommendations.
  

Migration:

• Most colleges will go live on BB 6 for summer. NOVA will go live for fall.
• Cannot guarantee any changes made after today will be included in the BB 6 implementation (the initial 3000 courses that are being migrated).
• If colleges archive course information, they can upload to BB6.
• A preferred method for LSA’s to limit course access is to flag courses as unavailable - please do not remove them.
• All user accounts created as of today will be pushed over. Any new faculty accounts created will need to be sent to Matt. Please create a list of these new accounts (the BB ID) to learn@vccs.edu by around March 1st. After March 7th, faculty will be added directly via DS2.
• If you have additional course ID’s you would like to pass along to Matt for inclusion in the migration, please get them to him no later than Feb. 15th. If you would like to include any courses in the NOVA migration, please provide these course ID’s by June15th
  
  

Blackboard Training at New Horizons:

• will be at the Hotel Roanoke starting Thursday afternoon. All sessions will be held at the Higher Ed. Ctr. on Thursday morning, because space is not available at the Hotel Roanoke. An online signup form will be advertised about a month before the training. There will be a waiting list, and if space is available, we will accommodate as many people as possible.
  
  Note: If you come on Thursday and Friday hands-on sessions will be at the Higher Education Center. Presentations Wednesday, the college must pay for that night. A final schedule will be posted on VCCS Discuss as soon as possible.