It seems as though there is a new article on education technology analytics every day. These typically discuss bridging multiple applications, using complicated solutions, to deliver a new level of intelligence.

While we read a great deal about this approach, our discussions with Blackboard Administrators are more focused on the learning management system and developing an understanding of how it is being used. For example, we are routinely asked:

• How is Blackboard being used?
• How many "active" courses are there?
• What course components are most popular?
• What courses are most active?
• Are faculty logging in routinely?

We have this grade center building block discussion quite often. Over the years, we have helped a number of institutions build gradebook-SIS integrations and the results are very exciting. This posting is meant to help in your analysis and outline the common pitfalls and opportunities we’ve experienced.

In our experience, automatically exporting grades from Blackboard does deliver on the promise. It speeds grade submission time considerably and reduces the number of steps, and amount of time, required of faculty. It also makes final grades more transparent to students and virtually eliminates human error. These are significant benefits to setting up a grade transfer from Blackboard to your SIS, but there are several important project tasks to be aware of.

Where have the independent academic technology consultants gone?

This was the conclusion an ad hoc "committee" of education technologists and software vendors came to during a recent Educause event in Austin. While not a groundbreaking discovery, we looked into why it this the case, especially during a time when the industry is facing a significant paradigm shift in e-learning technology. This, coupled with the explosion of viable open source technologies [such as Moodle, Sakai, Joomla, Drupal, Alfresco and others], seems like an ideal time for an emergence of the independent education technology consultant to help navigate these waters.

Many of our Blackboard clients are planning their switch to Blackboard 9 in the next 4-8 months. A significant part of the preparation is ensuring that faculty feel positive about and prepared for the interface changes in Blackboard 9. As we discuss making this switch with our clients, we often refer them to a rich online website by Corrie Bergeron at Lakeland Community College in Ohio. While we do not have any formal relationship with the college, we've found its resources to be quite valuable.

Following the tradition of the Blackboard community sharing resources with each other, Mr. Bergeron maintains a meta-site linking to Blackboard 9 resources developed by the higher education community. These include:

• Overviews
• Detailed written documentation
• Screencasts 
• Known issue lists 

In addition, the site is updated regularly and each new resource is clearly marked for those returning to the site often. If you are thinking of the upgrade, we encourage you to visit http://www.lakelandcc.edu/dl/bb9/

The Blackboard team at Ohio University is now piloting Blackboard 9 and they would like to share a resource that has already helped their pilot users.

So that users can assess their browsers’ readiness for Bb 9, OU has created a new browser and plug-in checker. The checks for plug-ins and settings are comprehensive, and users have found the explanations of results particularly helpful. Take a look here.

If you choose to link to this browser checker, please credit Ohio University on your website as the creator of this tool.

This is a question we see often and Jana Avery from Virginia Commonwealth University provides excellent insight into what makes a successful Blackboard administration team:

I think a critical component to any learning management system is the group that provides administration and support. The combination of varying levels of expertise makes all the difference, especially if your university maintains their own Blackboard servers. With the actual server hardware and OS being managed by local server admins, it's important to have at least one person on the learning system admin team that also has server and networking expertise. Many end user issues are related to network performance and server configuration. One person who can do programming and development, specifically with building blocks and automated enrollment processes, etc. plays an important role as well. Once you have this expertise in the group, then add two folks to handle end user support and basic admin, and one person to handle more technical end user support and admin. And the glue that holds it all together and makes it work is the manager of the group. The manager should have technical skills (among many others) in order to accurately assess the issues, provide guidance, and be supportive of the group as they work towards the most feasible solution. The manager functions as part of the team, and at the same time, is the backbone and leader for the team. I think that the actual training and workshops for end users should NOT be part of the learning system admin team. If so, then more personnel would be needed to adequately handle that aspect in order to avoid an overwhelming workload that would result in lower quality of support for the user and the system, which ultimately leads to an organization that functions entirely on "putting out fires".

This insight was provided by Jana Avery at Virginia Commonwealth University:

I think the one thing that I've found to be a critical resource is the use of Wikis for documenting everything about our learning system, including our support issues. Knowing that "most" IT folks don't thoroughly document processes and procedures, it was a tremendous benefit to me, as the newest member of our group, to discover that Wikis were being used to document all our learning system configurations and procedures. Keeping the information current can be a challenge at times, but we manage to get it done. We have expanded our use of Wikis to include our current support issues, workarounds, and fixes. Having this information in a central location is extremely helpful when troubleshooting and trying to desperately remember what the fix was the last time we encountered the issue. As we prepare for upgrading to Blackboard 9, we have a separate Wiki for all our testing, planning, and other details. It's a great way to coordinate our efforts and track the issues we need to address. We all make our own notes about various projects and processes, so it's really just a matter of training ourselves to enter those details in the Wiki, instead of somewhere that only we (individually) have access to. We also use the Blackboard Content System to store files that we may refer to in our Wiki documentation. This allows us to maintain copies of the latest versions of building blocks, files in specific formats (Excel spreadsheets, etc.), or other important files; and put links to them in the Wiki.