Special Presentation

Matt Davis arranged for Blackboard Alliance addressed the group about Premier Partnerships, an action item request:

Judy Lynn and Ted Hopper provided backgroun on Acxiom, Wimba, Echo360. More information about Bb building blocks is at Premier Partner Downloads area at Behind the Blackboard.

Overview of the Products -

Axciom - Student Identity Verification: it uses challenge questions to verify identity. The institution controls number of questions, pass/fail rate, authentication steps. The introductory offer is limited to North America Higher Ed clients. It will eventually be bundled in Bb Learn 9. A limited number of verifications per year to institutions who want to try the product and determine need. Additional verifications and related services are available from Acxiom. For more info: http://blackboard.com/acxiom.

Wimba - partnering with Pronto instant messaging system. A building block integration -- it quickly auto-populates the students Pronto with students and instructors enrolled in courses at the school.

Echo360 - Personal Lecture Capture tool. Lecture Capture Tool and Building Block are available at no extra cost. Up to 25 Personal Capture applicatioin downloads per institutions. More information at www.blackboard.com/echo360. This is NOT the enterprise level Echo360 service.

Randy asked whether Pronto is being pushed to replace the Chat Room tool? Ted replied that is was not. Randy also asked about clarification of the "year" - It is a "license" year.



Hot Topics

Paula Lee - asked about courses and groups, whether administrators could get access to student and faculty mail messages. One of the legacy designs of WebCT/Vista is to prevent access of any kind to mail messages because they are considered private. The only way to gain access is to take control of a user's account and login as the user. Sam described how that would be considered a violation of FERPA rights at Nevada State and how NSHE limits access of that kind to any and all system users. Randy confirmed the procedures for gaining access to mail messages.



Round Table

Travis Kramer - reported a success story. Iowa State hosted a Vista Users Panel that 250 users attended, the most ever. The turn out and the performance of Iowa State's Vista server were so impressive that a new employee from UK at Birmingham wanted to know if IaSt's server would go down because they hosted a panel of that size.

Randy Dalhoff - last Saturday 6 a.m. he started the upgrad Vista 8.0.3 and by 8:05 a.m. the system was successfully running on 8.0.3. The settings for 8.0.3 for secure pages have to be reset for Wimba Classroom and Voice tools. The standard settings for pages are SSL.

Sam McCool - reported on the progress of moving to new hardware and the success so far in moving all of the data to a 3 node Oracle 10.02.02 rack. The application is running on a 10 node Linux system. So far only three nodes appear to have problems linking to the load balancer.

Paula Lee - asked about when copying courses, do settings for peer review (set to True) in Discussions get reset during the course copy process. We'll have to test it. She also asked about WebDAV - is this process worth the trouble? Single step WebDAV is available only to IE7. David found that the one step in IE8 doesn't work. It is useful for moving folders of content. Discussion followed about uploading content files. David shared a resource for IE - http://www.its2.uidaho.edu/blackboard/help_docs/Setup/index.htm#ie

Nick Dean - still working on semester startup and having issues with managed hosting.

Jamie Bethel, Melody Brake - another success story: They were able to delete almost 5000 learning contexts in 10 days to clean up storage data. Posted details in chat area: Colorado State University
Learning Context Deletion Process Summary, (8/11/09): Daniel.Reed@colostate.edu, System AdminCSU operates a 12 node cluster running on Solaris. Our Oracle 10G DB is 851 GB in size. We have been running CE 8.0.2 since May 2009. The CSU process begins by using the Powersight module to identify the learning contexts to be deleted. We developed Powersight queries that create flat data files that are used to create XML files. Perl scripts were used to transform the flat data files into IMS compliant XML. The last part of the process used the command line API to import the XML and delete the learning contexts. This process allowed CSU to delete 4940 learning contexts in 10 days. The one limiting factor in the process is the number of rows in the CMS_CONTENT_ENTRY table in the DB. CSU never exceed 180K rows in this table, this allowed our DB garbage collection to finish successfully in two hours every night during the process. Lastly, Meloday reported that CSUS has started to test Bb Learn 9.

Lester Bowser - standing in for National University, observing today.

Karen Tan - reported on the successful move to new data environment. Reported an unusual experience with Save Password with Browser option using Firefox 3.0.x it concatenates the the tech's name with student's after they have tried to help student change password.

Joe Jacobson - asked about 64-bit browsers and support questions around. Nick reported that Flash doesn't work and Quick-Time blacks out the control bar. A Quick-Time alternative is available.

Jack Sharon - nothing new today.

David Schlater - reported that the upgrade to 8.0.3 went well. And, he modified the browser checker file to give blessings to FF 3.5.x and Safari 4.0.3. Classes start on Monday. David asked about if anyone knows how to get an advanced copy of the next version of Safari - pre-lease of Apple browsers? Nobody reported knowing. A beta of 4.0 had been available before the formal release of version 4, but no betas of future upgrades are available so far.

Brett Hardee - upgrading to 8.0.3 and glad to hear that Safari 4.0.3 has resolved issues with left navigation bar.