A Year Later Looking Back and Moving Forward

Washington State UniversityPeg Collins pcollins@wsu.eduCorinna Lo corinna@wsu.edu

July 11, 2007

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A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving Forward Fall Semester 2006 CE 6 Network

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A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving Forward Fall Semester 2006Performance Graph – JVM Available Memory

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6 unscheduled outagesUnresponsive support

from Blackboard

Large file downloads (JVM out of memory)

Reboot sequence

Significant Growth

A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving Forward “What have you done for me lately?”

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A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving Forward Spring Semester 2007 CE 6 Network

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A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving ForwardSpring Semester 2007Performance Graph – JVM Available Memory

Added new Managed Node C to serve user

Managed Node A as dedicated JMS

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A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving Forward Production Issues: Fall semester 2006

• More outreach and support needed– Internal staff not trained and prepared when critical person

was ill– More faculty training

• AP1 upgrade not ready for August start so implemented in October– A really bad idea

• Java applet for file upload/download– Clients update via auto update hard to undo– Eventually we disabled this applet - a really good idea

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A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving Forward Production Issues: Spring and Summer semester 2007

• Greater stability from added 3rd node improved faculty attitude toward the “new” system

• Experience with the CE6 problems led to improved help resources in CTO wiki

• Blackboard re-branding of WebCT• Beta AP2 program led to higher level of confidence in

the new release and more knowledge of the known issues

• Installation of production AP2

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• No major upgrade in the middle of semester• More outreach, faculty training• Identify problem, growth and trends• Added node where necessary (allow one to be dedicated for

JMS if possible)• Disabled Java Applet for file up/download• Joined BETA program• Joined Vista SWAT user community• Cross-training• Good Job! (no one knows how many problems you have

prevented by your due diligence)

A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving ForwardSummary

Peg Collins pcollins@wsu.edu

Corinna Lo corinna@wsu.edu

Contact Information

A Year LaterLooking Back and Moving Forward

California State University, Chico

Carlos Araya (caraya@csuchico.edu)

July 11, 2007

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Looking Back

• Spring 2007 at a glance– 15000 Students on the system

– About 1000 faculty

– Running dual CE/Vista implementation

• Vista is our primary LMS

– Teaching both blended, and fully online courses

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Looking back

• Growing Up and Learning Experiences– JVM heap issues and Powerlink– Unexpected Restarts

• Communication• Support

– Transition Pains– Hardware and Software issues

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Looking back

• Growing Up and Learning Experiences– JVM heap issues and Powerlink– Unexpected Restarts

• Communication• Support

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Looking back

• Transition Pains– Hardware and Software issues

• Java version and update• Users’ understanding

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Looking back

• Accomplishments– Team and program related

• Solid team with members from across the campus (training, tech, support, management)

• Ran a 5-course pilot using Wimba’s Live Classroom without any problems

• Developed Knowledge base• Developed custom tracking system

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Looking back

• Accomplishments– Technical

• Automated migration script/process• Users and courses added in 2 hours or less• Rolling restarts as opposed to full shutdown

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Looking back

• Personal Accomplishments– Made it with my sanity pretty much intact– Mostly gave up caffeine too!

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Moving forward

• Finishing up migrations by end of Fall– Working with stragglers– Should we make exceptions?

• Team Transitions– People come and people go

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Moving forward

• Fully integrated with powerlinks– Wimba Live Classroom– Wimba Voice Tools– TurnitIn– Turning Point clickers

• One hotfix for 4.2– Hopefully by the time of the conference

A Year Later Looking Back and Moving Forward

Brown UniversityPat Zudeck pzudeck@brown.edu

July 11, 2007

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• 7,744 full-time students• 658 faculty• Running Blackboard Learning System - CE 6.1 on

Oracle• 500 courses - no fully online courses

A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving Forward Facts about Brown

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A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving Forward Fall Semester 2006

• Phased implementation – phase III• Built on phase I & phase II– (10 courses in spring 2006,

55 courses in summer 2006)• Decided from assessment of spring not to fully release

the system until spring 07 • Changed goal of fall to 100 or 150 classes with caveat of

no new courses on CE4• Marketed to all faculty allowing them to choose either

system but letting them know we would be moving everyone over in the spring

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A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving Forward Summer 2006

• Application pack 1 installed • Developed a testing plan for updates and future

application packs• Created a Sandbox course• We had mandatory use of CE6 • Summer Institute – 11 faculty indepth for 3 days training

– early adopters in their departments• Developed plan to migrate existing courses• Ran training sessions in preparation for Fall

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A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving Forward Fall semester 2006 - Continued

• Rebranding – MyCourses • New login page • Hired student to help with semester start up• Outreach and training to new faculty• Offered group training sessions • Ran UCS elections on MyCourses• After positive feedback and relatively smooth semester

start up decided not to limit courses• Had over 350 classes use system in Fall

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A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving Forward Spring semester 2007

• Phase IV • Success and assessment from Phase III decided to go

ahead with completion of migration• 496 courses• 399 instructors• approx. 5,000 students• FEC elections• Best of MyCourses Awards• Moved all groups and special courses• Developed plan for moving archived courses –

repurposing CE4 server, increased backup and storage

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A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving Forward Issues

• Support – not real responsive – (a year to fix webdav for Mac) – no more hot fixes

• Course backups – taking us 4 days to do a complete backup (49 GB)

• Patches to servers could take longer than expected and have to make sure development server is exactly the same configuration as production

• jre compatibility• migrating courses

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A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving Forward Survey says…

• Faculty survey spring 2007 – 56 responses – good sampling of departments

• 82% had used CE6 in a previous semester• Ease of use on a 5 point scale averaged 2.9• Issues – uploading files, java, interface not intuitive,

difficult to edit and arrange content – “The Mac user interface really stinks.”

• 75% of respondents felt that CE6 has enhanced their teaching experience

• 58.9% of respondents said they were satisfied or very satisfied with CE6 at Brown

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A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving Forward Survey says…

• Student survey spring 2007 – 67 responses – good sampling of years and departments

• 85% had used CE6 in previous semesters• Ease of use on a 5 point scale averaged 2.7• Issues – can only open in one window, slow, get bumped

out of system, java• 64.2% of respondents felt that CE6 has enhanced their

learning experience• 52.3% of respondents said they were satisfied or very

satisfied with CE6 at Brown

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A Year Later – Looking Back and Moving Forward Lessons learned

• Continue with outreach, training, marketing• Training and documentation for help desk staff• Plan for extra time and the unexpected when

applying server patches and upgrades• Stay on top of listserv and user group

discussions• Nothing beats 1-1 meetings – in class

demonstrations

A Year Later Looking Back and Moving Forward

University of San DiegoShahra Meshkaty meshkaty@sandiego.edu

July 11, 2007

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WebCT@USD

• Private Catholic University• 7000 students-Under Grad & Graduate • 500 Concurrent courses Face-to-Face • 100+ Blended/Distance• Used WebCT V1:V6• WebCT/LMS Staff has grown since last

year from 2 to 5 1/2 permanent and several distributed coordinators.

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Looking Back…Moving ForwardCurrent Structure

• Hardware structure in place– Production System – Dev System for restore or DR– Backup Strategies– Restore Process– Enough Disk Space for future growth– DBA involvement earlier in the process

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Hardware & Software

• RedHat Linux Enterprise– WebCT Campus Edition- CE6– Running on Oracle 10G– Apps server is Sun Fire V20z – Database is Sun Fire V40z

• Memory & Disk space:– App Tier is 4 Gig– Database Tier is 16 Gig– CE4 was 100 Gig (database)– CE6 now 200 Gig (database)

• App Tier and database tier– Communication between the 2 systems is reliable and fast

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Look Out! …We Learned the Hard Way….• Installation Options

– When you install CE6 there are 2 options:• Standard install and custom install

– We did standard install and then changed to custom install (reliability and redundancy)

– Hardware and software failures• CE migration tool within CE4 to migrate to CE6

– We shouldn’t have migrated users account- no need to have done this because we use LDAP

• We migrated accounts in which there was no content associated with it. Waste of time & resource

• We use SIS integration to pull user’s information • We pull it from VAX or LDAP system

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SIS Integration Challenges• User account from CE4 cannot be integrated with the

SIS integrations– Sourceid.source is different– Example:

• CE4 is webct• CE6 is webct_ldap

• Best practice -- purchase SIS integration from BB if you do not have internal programmers to write xml codes

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Looking Back & Moving forward…Content Migration

• Content Migration from 4 to 6 was almost flawless- but very painfully SLOW!– Example: 100 gig of data takes about 100

hours of export and 100 hours of import• This was not anticipated• This could not be done daytime• Allow plenty of time

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Critical Communication• Us & the users

– Difficult because we weren’t 100% sure of the process – Painful process of WebCT/BB merger and multiple change of TSM– Faculty understanding changes in CE6 procedural and feature wise

• Requesting to migrate their courses– Java issues and constant bug reports– Training/Re-Training--Refresher/Q&A/Modules/appointments– Being readily available

• Us with each other to establish and improve our approach and strategies

– How to keep track of courses and professors and who have access and when they needed to gain access >> no simple solution

– Making sure that the requests were completed in a timely manner– We were the 1st point of contact >> less frustration– Created many clear forms and documentation--training material– Coordination with registrar, DBA, Sys Ad, distributed support, instructional

support etal– Updated Support Site, added STA to support and lots of new support strategies

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Q-TIPS

• Start/End date essential• CE6 Crosslisting is different than CE 4• Migrate courses in segments

– Re-migrating the same course will not override the previous migration

• Workaround: delete the previous migrated section from CE 6 then re-migrate

• Template and Sandbox courses• More enhanced training & documentation and

better support site

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Mission Accomplished!

• Migration timeline process:– Bugs and hot-fixes– Lost and hired new staff

• ITS has granted CE6 critical system status– Admin/IT realized critical status of

the LMS

• We learned team and collaborate work power

• We revised Strategies• We dealt with demands, needs,

confusion and restructuring

• Homer is put to sleep! (We had to cut the cord)

What Do We Do Now?• All material updated (Effective

training, web site, support)• Future plans-- powerlinks,

audio/video/multimedia/podcasting/streaming video/Apreso

• Pedagogical improvements• Survey to get a better sense• Methods to encourage faculty• improve services and make our

system more reliable and robust

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Shara Meshkaty(meshkaty@sandiego.edu)Dat Tran (datt@sandiego.edu)

A Year Later Looking Back and Moving Forward