Here on our campus the official first week of the semester has come to an end.  When I was the Blackboard Administrator for our campus, it was often times the first chance I had to take a breath.  

Many of you will probably be putting a few hours in over the weekend solving problems with registration, course bugs, and upgrade issues now starting to show.

May I suggest that when you get a chance to take your breadth you gather interested parties together for a debriefing or reflection.  

First of all, review reports of what kind of support issues you are having?  Are you using some sort of help desk or other tracking software that allows you to track the kind and issue calls you are getting from your faculty and staff?    We use a tool called footprints and all calls to our help desk are tracked there.  We can run reports at any time to look for trends with our Blackboard Course Management system.  

If you do not have a tracking system, bring interested parties together to discuss issues that popped up, and make plans to deal with them.  Is there a particular issue that plagues you over and over each semester?

Perhaps student registrations are not working properly, or that you are doing batch loads and it takes 12 - 24 hours for registrations to get there.  Students and Faculty are frustrated. 

Perhaps you consistently get a call from faculty about a particular tool in Blackboard.

Find the key issues that keep you up at night, or swamp you, the ones your institution could possibly take care of.  Then make a plan to fix those.  After a few weeks into the semester, the calls taper off. That is the time to update your training, introduce new training, and implement code or systems that will make a difference next semester.

There may be things you have no control over.  Come up with solutions you can implement, and continue to fight for the ones that need some administrative backing and funding.

You can make a difference, and your debriefing and reflection will make the next semester go easier.