Red - Greater interest to FacultyBlue - My additional commentsAttended: Central (could not speak), Danville, Germanna, John Tyler, Lord Fairfax, New River, Northern, Patrick Henry, Rappahannock, Southwest, Thomas Nelson, Virginia Highlands, System Office.
Did not attend: Blue Ridge, Dabney, Eastern Shore, J. Sargeant Reynolds, Mountain Empire, Paul D. Camp, Piedmont, Southside, Tidewater, Virginia Western, Wytheville
Question: Is it too late to get some Spring and Summer courses archived / restored ?
Answer: No. Please send us a list.
All of our Spring and Summer Courses are being exported. If you needed a specific course archived / restored you must call me ASAP.
Question: What about organizations?
Answer: Organizations will be archived/restored after
Dec 20
Question: What is the status of explore.vccs.edu? Is it like production bb7?
Answer: It's not our official Test instance, and needs to be brought more in line with final production settings.
Question: Will students have the content system? What about messages?
Answer: Will check with AS & R on messages, but no content system for students.
Question: How will domains be configured?
Answer: One primary College Administrator will have access to data system-wide. Backups and other support functions will only have access to data within their college domain. This new College Administrator function will be restricted using privileges for access to elements that were previously restricted by documented procedures (e.g. Building Blocks management).
Question: Can colleges keep more than the current four semesters of data.
Answer: No. Old courses represent a drag on the performance of current courses.
Question: Will the various administrator utilities continue to work?
Answer: We cannot definitively answer this at this time. Joshua Siegler at PVCC rewrote some for Blackboard 6. Perhaps if you are nice to him? We urge administrators to review the Blackboard 7 interface since some things may now be possible in the GUI that were not previously possible, e.g. the GUI has a method for making multiple courses available or unavailable.
Question: What about TMPL, DEVL and WRKS courses?
Answer: Good point. We will include these in our
post-Dec 20 migration.
Question: What about other kinds of courses, e.g. NVCC has some hybrid repositories which are still coded as NS99
Answer: ITS will attempt to facilitate all kinds of migrations. Typically all colleges need to do is to provide a list of course IDs. These custom migrations will take a lower priority unless there are good reasons why not.
Question: Will there be a web site for the Blackboard migration, aside from posts to VCCS Discuss? It would be useful to have something staff could be pointed to.
Answer: We will continue to post to VCCS Discuss and talk to Client Services about a web presence. Helpnet is currently in transition and we hope to create a significant Blackboard presence on a newly designed Helpnet site. We do not have a date for this however.
Question: We have previously had issues with accent marks in foreign languages during migrations - can we review and make sure there are no issues in 7?
Answer: We will test, but Bb7 is explicitly designed for multiple languages so we are hopeful that there will be no issues.
Question: Will colleges need to insert instructors into exported courses.
Answer: No. ITS will take care of this.
Question: What about course cartridges and building blocks from publishers?
Answer: Building blocks will generally be deferred until after the beginning of the Spring semester. An advantage in Blackboard 7 is the ability to install building blocks but have them off by default in courses. This appears to be a good solution for publisher building blocks.
Question: How will the content system migration be done?
Answer: Best advice at this point is to wait to copy content over until after student Go Live. ITS will facilitate this. Faculty and staff can add brand new content prior to that as long as use they use folder names unique to the Blackboard 7 system (i.e. so that they don’t get overwritten in any migration process). Note that we may face similar issues with Wimba content.
Question: What about the day of the switchover?
Answer: On the day of the switchover, learn.vccs.edu will simply point to the new system, not the old one (which will still be available at bb6.vccs.edu).
Fall 2007 courses will not be immediately available on the new system, but will be migrated over as quickly as possible, starting with those courses that have incompletes. A guesstimate is that the migration of courses with incompletes might take half a day. ITS will make a good faith effort to identify those courses in SIS and correlate them to courses in Blackboard, but given that there are not always a one-to-one match between the systems, colleges are encouraged to identify such courses themselves and send the information to ITS. After incompletes, Fall 2007 courses will be migrated college by college.
Question: Can Blackboard administrators get access prior to faculty and staff seeing it?
Answer: ITS has fairly widely publicized the November 1 Go Live for Faculty and Staff. This date is probably not negotiable, but Blackboard administrators have discretion at their own college in terms of how they publicize the availability of the new system.
Question: Blackboard Community/Portal system: who will move tabs and modules, and will they continue to work the same way?
Answer: General idea (barring better ones) is to reproduce the same structure and procedures as in version 6. However, tab and module administration can be delegated to some extent in the domain context. There is no ideal solution to moving modules from 6 to 7. Current plan is to leave this in the hands of college staff to do during the November/December time frame.
Question: What about portal pages that rely on the content system (e.g. for images)
Answer: Should not be a problem. Just reproduce on Blackboard 7. Copying Content System content is fairly straightforward. Simply drag and drop the webdav folder to desktop and from desktop to the new system. Then check permissions.
Question: Is the menu ordering problem when copying courses fixed?
Answer: Yes
Question: Will all the mime types be on Blackboard 7?
Answer: Yes
Question: What is the compatibility with Vista and IE7?
Answer: This is part of the reason we chose 7.3, which claims to resolve most if not all such issues.
Question: Does CD / offline content work?
Answer: This has been inherently problematic ever since browsers like IE and Firefox become more security conscious. Not entirely sure, but wouldn’t raise expectations.
Question: Manual accounts for adjuncts and students?
Answer: For adjuncts in defined training purposes, this is allowed with appropriate tracking and documentation, using e.g. LFCCTrain01 as an account name. However, such accounts should not be used long term, and the correct way to get into Blackboard is via SIS. Students should never have manual accounts and should be driven by SIS data.
Question: Does iframe content work okay?
Answer: Yes, it should. We are still planning on implementing SSL and this might impact references to external sites. Please test.
Question: Can a college administrator change their role in a course?
Answer: Because the new College Administrator role is not a System Administrator, they will not have access to the Quick Enroll feature in the standard course menu. However, the interface for accessing and enrolling users into courses on the System Admin control panel has been streamlined so that enrollment and the role assignment can be done on the same screen.
Question: Given that many people will be on the road to the October 9 training, will it still go ahead?
Answer: Yes, and we will try and record next week's call. It may well be a short call.
