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Technology Advisory Council (TAC) Notes

October 2 , 2008 Meeting Notes

Members Present: Warren Ashley, Ron Bergmann, David Bradfield, Carole Casten, Kim Clark, Mohammad Eyadat, Farah Fisher, Jack Han, Nathlyn Hirohama, Kazimierz Kowalski, Sandra Parham, Marion Smith, Yvette Velarde

Guests: Linda Goldman, Shon Lee

The meeting was chaired by Dr. Ron Bergmann, CSUDH CIO and Acting Associate Vice President, Information Technology.

Blackboard - Ron Bergmann

  • The beginning of the semester was hectic with the integration of Blackboard to PeopleSoft coinciding with the upgrade of Blackboard to V7.3. Now, with the daily Blackboard snapshot pulling data from PeopleSoft and users being authenticated through the LDAP, Blackboard is running very slowly. Actually, Warren reports that it's been slow since the spring.
  • Doug Borcoman has advised faculty to structure their tests so that their students are not all accessing the same test at the same time.
  • Meanwhile, Ron spoke with the president of Blackboard last Friday and again this week. The solution lies in our upgrading from our old, slow 2002 servers. Our servers are at Blackboard, so we have to coordinate the upgrade with them. Further, since we're supposed to allocate 18 hours for the upgrade, we need to pick a time that has the lowest negative impact on our students.
  • In addition to picking a day/time to start the upgrade, this meeting's task is to develop a communications plan.
  • This is the request Warren will make to Blackboard: (1) Upgrade starting Sunday, October 19, at noon; (2) upgrade starting Sunday, October 26, at noon.
  • Advance/contemporaneous communications:
    • Marion to students via toroMail
    • Ron to DHEmail
    • Doug to full-time faculty mailing list
    • Ron to deans to redirect to part-time faculty
    • Ron to Academic Senate
    • Kim to electronic bulletin boards in LUSU
    • Shon to University home page
    • Steve Williams to Blackboard home page and every course Web site
  • Communications while it's down:
    • Append "...until xxx" to Blackboard's standard message "System unavailable."
    • Place advisory on IT Help Desk outgoing voice mail message
  • And also, instead of saying "Blackboard's down", be more positive with the word "upgrade."
  • We have 560 gigabytes of data on our Blackboard servers. This is 12 years' worth of data that is probably also slowing the system down. Warren hopes to limit active retention on servers to two years, placing other courses into retrievable archives.
  • About 100 students are currently using Blackboard via provisional accounts, developed by hand by Steve. These students got special handling because their old 98 student ID numbers (Banner numbers) were not recognized by PeopleSoft, yet they needed immediate access to Blackboard. At some point, Warren would like to sweep all accounts out of Blackboard, then have a fresh load of accounts from PeopleSoft. Doing that now would wipe out the provisional accounts, so he proposes doing the clean load the first week of January, before Winter Session classes begin. This would result in dual accounts for students having provisional accounts now. All of these students would be notified that they should abandon the provisional accounts and start using the new accounts.

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Open Forum

  • Sandra offered to share funding of a technician with Ron in order to provide technical support in the library in evenings and on Saturdays. Ron appears to like that idea, thinking that a new IT Help Desk technician would have an evening and Saturday seat in the library as the first assignment. Sandra notes that students want total customer service; in addition to navigating library resources, they want help logging into Blackboard and other tasks. Ron notes that security issues limit wide access to staff members rather than student assistants.
  • Ron notes that three technicians were on duty the first two Saturdays of the semester. They sat in the Welch Hall 2nd floor conference room with laptops. And the IT Help Desk had a table during Welcome Week. Techs were visible during Welcome Week, but next semester the Saturday support needs to be advertised.
  • Yvette creates some cross-listed classes in the class schedule (one physical class having two or more identities--course numbers--in the class schedule), but Steve Williams has reported that that's a problem for Blackboard. However, Blackboard users in the meeting indicated that it's not a problem at all: the faculty member just needs to copy the members of the smaller class into the larger class's roster. Then it becomes one big class in Blackboard, and the professor doesn't have to essentially teach one class twice. The courses would be split again when grades are posted, but that's in PeopleSoft, not Blackboard. Any professor who's having trouble creating the mass roster should contact Warren.
  • Sandra suggests that ATI be addressed in our next meeting. A Kurzweil text-to-speech machine (purchased jointly by Disabled Student Services and the University Library) is not working. The IT Help Desk installed it but does not have the expertise to show users how to use it. The library doesn't have a staff member who can provide training, and DSS may or may not have someone who can use it. Sandra notes that this is a cross-division issue, and she has a student waiting to use the machine.

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Next meeting: Thursday, November 6, 2008