White Paper. Archiving Blackboard Courses at UMBC. by Bob Armstrong & John Fritz

Transcription

1 White Paper Archiving Blackboard Courses at UMBC by Bob Armstrong & John Fritz

2 UMBC White Paper Archiving Blackboard Courses I. Summary...3 II. Overview of Blackboard Management...4 Course Creation and Maintenance...4 Training and Support...4 Application and Database Administration...5 III. Problem Statement: What is Archiving?...6 Why Should We Archive Courses?...6 IV. What Are Other Universities Doing?...7 V. Conclusions...8 Impermanence of Digital Storage...8 VI. Policies...9 Archiving...9 Deleting...9 For Consideration...9 2

3 I. Summary Blackboard (Bb) is a web-based course/content management system (CMS) used by nearly all of UMBC s 14,000 students, faculty and staff in more than 650 courses and 250 organizations every semester. At a minimum, Blackboard provides a passwordprotected web space for relevant course or community documents and announcements, but it is also used for online discussion boards, practice quizzes, electronic assignment collection, surveys and access to grades. In addition to supporting courses, notable uses of Bb include the Student Government Association s annual spring elections, the university s re-accreditation self-study and the Admissions Office s online placement exams for admitted students. UMBC piloted Blackboard in the Fall of 1999 with the first version referred to as Course Info. Since the initial installation, Blackboard has grown from an online tool that started with a minimal number of dedicated users, to a mission critical application with a core group of instructors, staff, and students that now number in the thousands. UMBC Bb Course Sites (Not Sections) Courses SP2000 SU2000 FA2000 SP2001 SU2001 FA2001 SP2002 SU2002 FA2002 SP2003 SU2003 FA2003 SP2004 SU2004 FA2004 SP2005 SU2005 FA2005 Each semester the number of courses continues to grow at a rate of about 15 percent and software upgrades are performed at least once a year with the introduction of new features and better back-end application support. With these annual upgrades and the continual growth in the use of the application comes increasing challenges in maintenance and support. This document outlines some of those challenges related to long term storage and use of Blackboard courses and communities, and focuses on the Blackboard production server and how it should be managed to support users. 3

4 II. Overview of Blackboard Management To better understand the course archiving problem, one needs to understand how Blackboard is managed at UMBC. This breaks down into four categories: User management Course creation and maintenance Training and Support Application and database administration User Management All students, faculty and staff are eligible to have a UMBC account, which they must activate online at Within 24 hours of creating a unique user id and password, users are able to access myumbc services, including , online registration, electronic bill payment, card access and use of Blackboard. Blackboard user accounts contain basic information including the user s name, address and Bb system role, which include system admin, system support, user administrator and none (default for most users). In addition to the system role, each user is assigned an institution role that corresponds with their primary function on campus (e.g., admin, student, staff, and faculty). By default, all new users are assigned the student role until changed by a Blackboard system administrator. Institution roles are used to control the Bb portal content. Course Creation and Maintenance Before 2004, a Blackboard system administrator created all UMBC Bb courses by hand as an empty shell, or by importing content from a previous course into the new course. Unique course ids were generated based on the course department, course number, section number, and semester (e.g., BIOL100_0101_FA2005). After the course shell was created, students either enrolled themselves or system administrators would batch enroll students to assist faculty. In fall 2004, OIT began using a batch creation process to automatically create a course shell for every course in the UMBC Schedule of Classes. By default, the course shell is unavailable to students, but can be turned on by the instructor of record who (along with officially registered students) is auto-enrolled into the companion Bb course shell. Creation of content and general course design is left up to the individual faculty member with assistance from Blackboard support staff as needed. Training and Support OIT staff provides training and support for Blackboard courses and communities. Hands-on workshops are scheduled at the beginning of each semester and are based on various tasks to create a successful course design. Basic topics include: Getting Started with Blackboard Adding Content to Your Blackboard Course Interactivity with Blackboard Communication Tools Using Assessments in Blackboard 4

5 OIT also develops and maintains online documentation to support commonly used course tools. These help sheets can be printed or viewed online as Flash movies. A Blackboard Basics CD that includes many of these same help sheets was produced this Fall. Links to all of the support materials can be found on the Blackboard Help tab before and after logging in at Application and Database Administration The Blackboard application and database are maintained by a server admin in OIT s Syscore unit charged with keeping all campus wide application software and hardware as up-to-date as possible. The Bb server admin works in conjunction with the other systems administrators to handle performance issues and other problems that occasionally occur. Minor application software updates require minimal down time and can be performed at any time with adequate notice given to faculty, staff, and students. Any upgrades that require extensive down time are performed during the January winter semester. During this upgrade, winter semester courses are moved to an alternate server so as not to interfere with active classes. All courses that are created on the production server remain there until they are deleted at the request of the primary instructor. 5

6 III. Problem Statement: What is Archiving? By definition, archiving is the process of preserving historic or public documents. Old or unused courses that are currently on the UMBC Blackboard production server could be archived to a new location accessible to OIT Blackboard administrators, or they could be archived and saved by the primary instructor of record. In either case, the archived course can only be restored to the production or test server by a Bb system administrator. Once the course is archived and saved, the original course could be deleted from the server. Why Should We Archive Courses? Currently, UMBC has 7,391 courses and 270 campus communities on the Blackboard production server. The distribution of courses is as follows: Fall Summer Spring Winter Fall Prior to FA The majority of courses on the server are older then one academic year, and some of the courses extend back to Fall Many courses are empty shells never turned on by instructors (see auto course creation above), or active courses they no longer use. As with any computer system or database, the less data that is present the higher the system performance. If old or broken courses are deleted off the production server and the data is removed from the application database the Blackboard application will run more efficiently during normal operation. This change in performance could be very noticeable during peak operating hours. Another advantage to archiving and removing old courses is how it will affect system backups and emergency system restores after a catastrophic event. Currently, a backup of only active ( current semester ) courses takes about five hours to complete, but a backup of the entire system takes approximately 24 hours to complete. While this backup is being performed, there is a greater load on the system CPU and this will also have an effect on overall system performance. Essentially, if there are fewer courses to backup, there will be less cpu utilization resulting in better system performance. A last advantage to removing old courses is less clutter on the myblackboard tab for faculty and students alike. Students are not able to delete or un-enroll from a course, which means many of them accumulate old courses that appear intermingled with their current courses. But if old courses are removed from the system the links to those courses will no longer appear in the My Courses module. Archiving old courses will remove course links and help to eliminate confusion that is experienced by many users. 6

7 IV. What Are Other Universities Doing? In September of 2005, OIT asked members of the independent Blackboard administrators listerve to share their archiving policies or practices. Ten institutions responded, but there was little consensus on how long courses should be on the production server before being archived (let alone deleted). Here are some examples of how they handle the issue. LeMoyne College in Syracuse, NY, keeps courses active on the server for one year and one semester. After that time they are archived to another location on the server for retrieval if necessary. The one year and a semester allows faculty to refer to "last years course" for materials not moved forward, and also allows for students working on incompletes to be able to finish (hopefully)... Learning Technologies in England, Archiving and Recycling of your course from one year to the next is currently your responsibility. There is no central provision of a Archive & Recycle Service. For information on the appropriate strategy see the LTSS guides or contact bb-help@bristol.ac.uk to discuss your requirements. University of California, Berkeley, CA, Courses will be removed from Blackboard and archived on another server after three semesters, e.g., a course created in spring 2002 will be archived at the conclusion of the spring 2003 semester (summer courses will be processed along with the subsequent fall semester courses). Archived courses will no longer appear in an instructor's My Blackboard portal area for immediate access. University of Scranton, Scranton, NJ, Because we recognize the importance of that time-saving course copy feature, we keep Blackboard courses on the server for a period of two years. After two years, in order to keep the Blackboard database at a reasonable size to ensure the best performance of the system, we remove Blackboard courses from the server. Please be assured that we make an archive copy of every semester's Blackboard course one day after grades are due for that semester. If you ever need to have the content of a Blackboard course returned to the server, you can fill out the Return Archived Course(s) to Server form. Once we receive the information from the form, we will use the archive copy to re-load the course onto a backup server, making the course content available to you again. Many of the other schools surveyed have similar policies. And many others don t seem to have any policy at all and just keep the courses available at all times. In addition, participants of the October 6, 2005, Maryland Blackboard Day at UMBC were informally polled about their archive policies. Few if any of the 30 institutions represented actually delete their older courses. A few said they only use Blackboard for current semester courses, which implies old courses are either archived or deleted. 7

8 V. Conclusions The advantages of archiving courses older then three years far outweighs the convenience of having them readily available on the production server. Deleting the old courses allows OIT to clean up the data files to improve system performance, users have less clutter from old courses on their my Blackboard page, and the archived courses will still be available to be restored to the server if necessary. Impermanence of Digital Storage One issue that was not reported by schools who do archive is how they address the needs of long-term storage with a trend of changing digital media. Libraries are facing this problem with borne digital documents, as floppy drives give way to CDs, which give way to DVDs, digital tape and so on and so on. Even Adobe Acrobat files (long considered to be one of the more stable of digital formats) is experiencing some uncertainty as Microsoft attempts to develop its own PDF (portable document format). Given the impermanence of digital storage, it seems clear that Blackboard system administrators cannot guarantee that any course can be restored no matter how old it is. For now, we must strike a balance between performance of current courses and access to older one that should inform everyone s decision making. * * OIT s Blackboard administrators will be consulting with UMBC Archivist Marci Peri to better understand the borne digital archival problem the Library is currently facing. 8

9 VI. Policies The purpose of these policies is to manage the number of courses on the Blackboard system so performance is not compromised and OIT can provide efficient support to UMBC students, faculty and staff. Archiving 1. Blackboard course sites that have been made available to students by instructors within one (1) academic year of the current semester s start of classes will remain on the production server during the current semester (e.g., FA 2005 courses remain available through FA2006). 2. All available Bb course sites older than one academic year will be archived without notification to the instructor of record at the start of each semester: a. The archive is permanently available to OIT system administrators and the instructor of record. b. Faculty can archive any course at any time and keep a local copy for their own records, but only OIT Blackboard administrators can restore an archived course. c. Restored courses may only be used to copy content into an empty, unavailable course shell, which OIT provides for every course every semester. d. Faculty will not be able to enroll or un-enroll students from the archived courses. e. OIT will only auto-enroll Bb course sites that contain a relevant course ID for the current semester (e.g., BIOL100_0101_FA2005). f. Faculty are encouraged to copy forward the most current version of their courses, by copying into an empty course shell and then requesting to delete past versions of the course. Deleting 1. OIT will only delete a Bb course site upon request of the instructor of record. This request MUST be in the form of an OIT ticket that can be created by using the Request to Delete a Course form on the UMBC Blackboard Help tab. Alternately, instructors can a request to blackboard@umbc.edu. 2. All Blackboard course sites that have never been made available by instructors, do not contain any content and have no record or activity will be deleted without notification to the instructor of record at the start of the next semester after they were created (e.g., empty FA2005 sites will be deleted at start of SP2006). For Consideration 1. For Academic Year only: a. OIT will notify instructors teaching current semester courses with past semester Bb course sites and ask them to copy forward their course into an empty course shell for SP2006 (per practice above). 2. OIT will explore developing permanent course development templates from which instructors can copy content into temporary course shells provided each semester. a. The courseid could be identified as courseid_instructoruserid_template 9

10 b. Issue: While OIT can choose not to Auto-Enroll such template courses, faculty are still able to enroll individual students, one at a time, which could lead to faculty using the same course site over and over, and interfere with the auto-enroll process that is currently in place. Since faculty tend not to un-enroll or delete students from their past courses, this could be very confusing for past and present students. 10