Upgrading Blackboard

Ethan Ehrenberg

Blackboard, NYU’s most widely used learning management system (LMS), supports nearly 45,000 faculty and students and thousands of course sites each semester. The University’s use of Blackboard has grown substantially since it was first introduced during the Fall 2002 semester; on average, today’s NYU student uses Blackboard in three courses per year, and the system has been integrated with other University applications, including Albert (the online course registration system) and NYUHome. Other higher education institutions also make extensive use of LMS — in 2006, 97 percent of all universities (and 99 percent of universities with Ph.D. programs) employed learning management systems, and on average, 70 percent of faculty used a course management system, primarily to provide supplemental materials for lectures and other classroom instruction.¹

NYU is planning an upgrade of its version of Blackboard for use in the upcoming academic year, on a schedule that will soon be published. The upgrade will result in an LMS with improved performance and greater functionality, while ensuring continued technical support from Blackboard, Inc., the commercial software vendor from which the University licenses the Blackboard software.

Like other vendors, Blackboard, Inc. routinely provides product upgrades intended to improve the system’s technical operation and add some of the features requested by their customers (such as NYU). As Blackboard recently announced, the version currently used at NYU will no longer be supported in the near future, so NYU and a number of other universities must upgrade to a newer version. Such an upgrade will entail a considerable effort on the part of ITS staff and those whose primary responsibility it is to support Blackboard, with the principal goal of making the transition to the newer system as smooth and rewarding as possible for NYU faculty and students.

Assisting You in a Smooth Transition

ITS plans to augment the in-person support and face-to-face training that it provides for Blackboard use with new and enhanced ways of obtaining help and instruction, and special support to smooth your transition to the new version. This will include streamlining the online Blackboard information and FAQs that ITS has developed over the years, replacing them with updated information that can be conveniently accessed via the searchable “Ask ITS” knowledgebase (located at http://AskITS.nyu.edu).

ITS is also expanding its Blackboard News and Alerts to keep the Blackboard community aware of important upgrade-related developments, such as scheduled downtimes, known issues, and bug fixes. As part of this effort, ITS recently launched a blog called “Blackboard News”² which may be read and commented on by anyone with an NYU NetID. In addition to web access, the blog posts can be delivered via RSS or through the “Blackboard News” email list (visit the blog to sign up). As we go to press, ITS is determining the upgrade schedule, which will be published in the Blackboard News Blog as soon as it is determined.

Under its LMS Liaisons Program, another initiative for enhanced Blackboard support, ITS will seek to identify school-based and departmental staff members who currently provide local support in the use of NYU Blackboard. The program will further empower these “local experts” with customized training, greater and preferred access to Blackboard information and support resources, and an optional system role providing additional access that will enable them to more directly support faculty members’ course sites.

Finally, ITS is initiating a Blackboard users group at NYU. This will be a self-moderated forum, in which people from the NYU community can share ideas and tips about using Blackboard and provide feedback on some of the new features introduced in the upgrade. Those interested in participating in this forum may send email to blackboard.discussion@nyu.edu.

Improvements, Enhancements, and New Features

Upgrading a mission-critical LMS — one which is necessary to teaching and learning, can sustain little or no service disruption, and demands a high level of immediate and sustained support — is no trivial task, especially at a university as large as NYU. ITS worked closely with representatives from Blackboard, Inc. to map out a plan for upgrading to a more current version of the software during the 2008-09 academic year, coordinating the many integration points of the NYU Blackboard system, minimizing any impact on those who use the system, and ensuring continued smooth functioning for this vital part of the University’s mission.

Most of the likely changes in this new version will fall into one of three categories: bug fixes (welcome news to those who have struggled with some of Blackboard’s known issues in older versions of the software!), incremental enhancements to some familiar areas, and new features and changes to existing tools.

One of the first fixes that those familiar with Blackboard will likely notice in the new version is a working WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) text editor available in most content and tool areas. This text editor exists in the version currently used at NYU, but compatibility problems prevent most people from actually seeing or using it.

The WYSIWYG text editor looks like a miniature word processing program. One can bold, italicize, or underline text; change font type, color, and size; run a spell check before posting; and embed multimedia objects such as video, audio, animation, and images directly in the page. Using the text editor, one can not only customize the appearance and presentation of content pages to a much higher degree, but also easily embed multimedia announcements on the front page of a Blackboard course site — for example, instead of just posting a welcome greeting in text, instructors could now greet their students, give instructions, or deliver an entire lecture as a pre-recorded audio file.

Here are some of the other most noticeable bug fixes and improvements that the upgraded Blackboard system will likely include:

• Interim grade calculations that no longer are skewed by the inclusion of not-yet-submitted assignments to display as zero.
• Course content that retains its previous semester’s order when copied by faculty members to a new semester’s course site.
• Faster and more reliable system performance.

Enhanced functionality is also anticipated for many familiar areas and tools. For example:

• A clearer separation of tools from content areas in the left-hand course menu, including a “Detail” view with an expandable tree structure that reveals all the materials in the course at once, eliminating the need to click through each area.
• In the Announcement tool, a check box allowing people to send an automatic email notification to course participants when posting a new announcement.
• An easier way to directly add tool links to content pages so that, for instance, instructors can initiate new discussion board forums alongside a particular content item such as a course reading or assignment.
• New test question types, some of which include matching, Likert scale, calculated formula, file uploads, and hotspots (which ask users to locate a point on an image such as a map or anatomical diagram), as well as more traditional question types.
• New language sets for use in menus and navigation, enabling instructors to present their Blackboard courses in other languages, such as French, Italian, Arabic, and Japanese, and either require their students to use their Blackboard site in this language or allow students to pick a language of their choice.

New and significantly redesigned functionalities will also likely appear. One possible new area is the “Self and Peer Assessment Builder”, which enables instructors to create assignments requiring students to review each other’s work and optionally to follow a set of criteria or model examples preset by the instructor.

Another new feature that may be available is the concept of “adaptive release”, which enables instructors to make some content visible only when certain tasks have been successfully completed. For example, an instructor could make the reading for Unit Two appear only after students had received a passing grade on the Unit One quiz. In this way, students could progress along a personalized learning path designed by the instructor but managed automatically by the system.

A handy “Syllabus Builder” may also be available in the new version, a step-by-step authoring wizard that enables instructors to build a better-functioning and more interactive syllabus in the Blackboard interface.

The Discussion Board will undergo major restructuring to provide important new functionality, while retaining much of the previous capabilities for moderated threaded discussions.The restructured Discussion Board will provide an improved interface, as well as the capability for course participants to subscribe to individual forums or threads and receive automatic alerts to new posts. It will also be possible to grade Discussion Board posts.

What’s Not Changing?

Most of the activities that faculty and students perform in NYU Blackboard will remain consistent with the current version, as will those features that are most vital to the smooth functioning of course sections within a Blackboard site.

For instance, one of the great advantages has been the ability to build course content and design cumulatively over time by copying content from a course’s site used in a previous semester into a new site for the current semester. NYU is committed to maintaining this ability and to providing easy access to content from several previous semesters, so that instructors can continue to build on a prior semester’s knowledge, even if the previous site was built in an older version of Blackboard.

You will continue to be able to log into Blackboard through the “Blackboard Classes” channel under the Academics tab in NYUHome using an NYU NetID and password. Both faculty and students will continue to see all current and past academic course sites, along with any non-academic organizational sites in which they’re enrolled (listed under “Other”). Links to important support information will remain in the channel above the list of classes, providing access to online information and instructions, as well as links through which faculty can activate their course sites. The ITS Client Services staff will remain available to provide phone, email, and in-person help for Blackboard-related questions, and staff members are already being trained on possible new features and tools, to help troubleshoot any issues that you may encounter.

ITS will also continue to provide automated student enrollment into NYU Blackboard sites associated with a course or section ID number. Instructors can continue to expect updated and accurate student enrollment in any Blackboard site they have activated, and course enrollment will remain accurate and up-to-date throughout the semester, even if students add or drop the course.

The most popular current Blackboard activities will remain largely unchanged. Among other things, instructors and teaching assistants will still be able to post announcements on the front page of their course sites, post a banner image, change the look and feel of a course, send email to the entire class or to selected individuals or groups, add a course syllabus for online viewing or download, check the student roster, organize and annotate a myriad of different content file types and links on one page, customize the course menu and internal course links, create and submit online assignments, make and manage groups, moderate online forum discussions, conduct real-time online classes or chats, and administer online tests, quizzes, and surveys. The familiar Blackboard functionality and tools that the NYU community has used will continue to be available to support teaching and learning.

When and How Will the Upgrade Happen?

ITS has committed to having a new version of NYU Blackboard available during the 2008-09 academic year, with all support and training in place. Successful migration to the newer version will require achieving many individual milestones, which will be set and reached only through close collaboration with our school-based experts and LMS Liaisons.

This will involve a number of technical, support, and training decisions. For example, in a technical decision designed to minimize system-wide downtime and overall service disruption, the Blackboard version upgrade will be completed through a “fresh installation” process. A fresh installation involves setting up the new version on different hardware, making sure it is functioning optimally, and then switching people to this system as the new courses begin to go online.

This is in contrast to an “in-place” upgrade, which requires changing the application software on the same hardware system on which the older version is operating, which can increase the likelihood of service disruptions. Choosing the fresh installation approach demonstrates ITS’ recognition of NYU Blackboard’s importance as an enterprise LMS, and our efforts toward ensuring a smooth transition.

To provide the best training and support possible, ITS is working with Blackboard, Inc. to schedule initial training for a core group of people. As we go to press, ITS is working to organize training for those in technical support roles within ITS and the Schools. In this way, the University can ensure that support personnel are well prepared to assist faculty and staff members in the effective use of any new or unfamiliar Blackboard features.

The core NYU Blackboard team, made up of staff from ITS as well as some school- and Library-based IT departments, is also developing a number of training workshops for faculty. Slated to begin in May and continue throughout the summer and the following academic year, the workshop titles will likely include focused sessions, such as “What I Need to Know About the Blackboard Upgrade: What’s Changed and What’s New?”, “Effective Use of Content: How to Take Advantage of Library Resources in Your Course Site”, “Making the Most of Discussions: Lessons for the New Discussion Board”, and “Keeping Students on Track: How to Use the Grade Center, Adaptive Release, and the Performance Dashboard to Personalize the Learning Experience”, in addition to “Getting Started” and “Blackboard Basics” training.

One-on-one sessions will continue to be available for faculty members requiring individual support. Clinic hours will also be available at regular times, in which individuals may “walk in” to a designated location and ask a Blackboard expert questions. Along with these in-person training opportunities, ITS also plans to offer expanded online support options, including training videos and online tutorials linked from the Ask ITS knowedgebase (located at http://AskITS.nyu.edu), and will be working with Blackboard, Inc. technical staff to quickly populate online information with support material for a new version.

Footnotes

1. EDUCAUSE Core Data Service Fiscal Year 2006 Summary Report - www.educause.edu/apps/coredata/reports/2006/
2. The Blackboard news blog is located at www.nyu.edu/blackboard/news/.

Author Biographies

Ethan Ehrenberg is a Faculty Technology Specialist within ITS Faculty Technology Services.

Page last reviewed: April 25, 2008. All content © New York University.
Questions or comments about this site? Send email to: its.connect@nyu.edu.