One Year Later
Jake Gannon
The University of Liverpool
Overview
 Look at Blackboard from 3 points of view
– Students
– Staff
– Computing Services Department
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History
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Previous WEBCT pilot
Decided on big bang start
All Modules
All Staff
All Students
 Now beginning our second year
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Students
 Proved popular
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FEBRUARY 2004
Active modules
Registered users
Active users
Page views
Course page views
Login success / sessions
Login failed
Apache hits
3426
33933
9281
1856320
638782
1779389
114110
6331084
Students
 Round the clock usages
 25K hits on Christmas Day
 Quick to complain if system was down
 Blamed Computing Services for lack of content
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Students
 Why did they like it so much?
– Used to web applications
– CSD had previously provided web based applications
– 24 Hour access
– Material available without the need to print out
– Can catch up if missed lectures
– Fast and reliable
– Apparent seamless integration into Student System
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Students
 Why did they like it so much?
 The software itself
– Easy to use
– Intuitive
– Responsive
 Specific Functionality
– Discussion Board
– Electronic Drop Box
– Online assessment
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Students
 Does it discriminate against non computer savvy?
 Certain subjects given advantage?
 Access issues
 Accessibility issues
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Staff
 Some keen some not so
 Concerns
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Make them redundant
Not using it seen as a black mark?
Some material may not be 100% their own
Student pressure to make use of it
Staff
 Quick to find problems
 Quick to request new features / functionality
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Departmental Modules for all their students
Wanted super user accounts
Wanted all staff to see all modules
Wanted improved assessments
Professor A
Maths 101
Maths 201
Maths 301
Professor A
Students from
Maths101
MATHS DEPT
Maths 101
Students from
Maths 201
Students from
Maths 301
Maths 201
Maths 301
Staff
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Wanted better stats, which staff using it
Wanted auditing
Content deleted but no one owned up
One case of malicious deletion
Staff
 Did NOT want quotas (disk usage currently 40GB)
 Wanted to record lectures and host them on BB
– We recommended windows Media encoder to reduce size
 Too many modules in module list
– No sort (We added space to the front of the title)
– Matching titles (We added year code to title name)
 Example1 Example 2 Example 3
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Staff
 Worried about plagarism
– We offer Copycatch on the desktop
– Looking at plug-in for Blackboard
 Requested reusable content
– One document to many courses
– One announcement to many courses
– One survey to many courses
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Staff
 Overall after one year staff positive
 Students attending lectures better prepared
 Quantity and quality of questions increased
 Staff receiving good feedback from students
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Staff
“I can honestly say for myself that in the eight year
I have been an academic this is the most useful
teaching aid to which I have had access”
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Staff
 Departmental Committees set up
 Staff employed to maintain departmental presence
 Self appointed departmental Champions
 Research grants secured
 Sharing good practice (bug mailing list)
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Technical
 Single Dell Power Edge server
 4 GB Ram
 4 x 1.5 Xeon with Hyper threading
 Mirrored hotswapable disk
 76 GB for DB and Blackboard
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Technical
 Single server for Database and Application
 Redhat Advanced Server
 Oracle 8i
 Blackboard 6.2.3.6-sp1 build 1
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Technical
 Lots of Redhat patches
 Lots of Firmware patches
 Running on old Kernel
 Lots of software patches
– list of patches
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Technical
 Patches cause problems
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Need to be tested
Downtime
Will it come back up
Undocumented changes
Reset SSL certificates
Reset Tuning
Reset login page
– Old Login page New Login Page
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Technical
 Redundancy / Recovery Strategy
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Database shutdown and backed up every night
Blackboard shutdown and file system backed up every night
Export all changed modules
Code for changed modules
Example results
cd /usr/local/blackboard/apps/content-exchange/bin/
./batch_ImportExport.sh -f file -l 1 -t export
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Technical
 Tuning
– Little tuning needed
– bb-config.properties
– bbconfig.appserver.minthreads=100
– bbconfig.appserver.maxthreads=400
– bbconfig.database.bb_60.db.maxpoolsize=100
 Only one performance problem
– Unrealistic defaults
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Technical
 Integration using Snapshot
– Data dumped from SIS every 24 hours
– Snapshot run every morning
– Fake students, courses etc appended to the end of feeds
– If not in feed then record disabled
– Example Snapshot feeds
– Snapshot results
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Technical
 Integration causes some confusion
 Not real-time
 Only registered students transferred
 In future transfer all students regardless of status
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Technical
 Lots of extra information required
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Log rotate which emails apache hits
total number of page views
total number of logins
total number of login failures
total number of staff users, per department.
Technical
 Lots of extra information required
– READONLY user account on the Blackboard Oracle database
– determine a students grades for a specific module (even if
student is no longer on the module).
– determine all objects which a user has placed into the digital
drop box across all modules.
– Transfer grades from BB back to SIS (demo)
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Technical
 Scripts are available from
http://pcwww.liv.ac.uk/csd/blackboard/scripts/
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Technical
 Future
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Memory Upgrade
Disk Upgrade
Load Balancing
Oracle clustering
Wireless access
Technical
 Future
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When do we start removing courses
Snapshot integration
Streaming Audio
Video Conferencing
3rd party Add-ons
Content Management System
Integration with other systems. Portal, student systems,
personnel etc
– Building Blocks
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Mailing List
 BB ADMIN mailing list
hosted by Arizona University
http://lists.asu.edu/archives/bbadmin-l.html
 Better than BB support 
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