Upgrading to Blackboard Learn 9 for CE/Vista clients

UPDATE: See this post for updated information on this topic.

This session was run by Paul Grist (Sr. Director of Solutions Marketing) and Matt Davis (Sr. Solutions Engineer). Their objective was to “provide a nucleus of a plan for you to move to BB 9(.x)”.

The upshot of the meeting is that 9.1 is still on track to be released in late 2009 or early 2010. It contains a couple features that most CE/Vista schools can’t really live without: learning modules and course files. Supposedly, the learning module changes also include better import from CE/Vista sections; this would be good, because the current import is “lossy” (that’s programmer slang for “it sucks”).

Unfortunately, I found another feature is still not included that some (most?) CE/Vista schools also can’t live without: crosslisting. The good news is that Blackboard has developed a “section merge” utility that provides a workaround for the lack of crosslisting. The better news is that this utility is free. Well, it’s free to schools that buy the $15,000 “Getting started with BB9 administration” consulting package; well, free if you consider $8000 a year for maintenance to be “free”. I’ve heard of “free as in speech”, “free as in beer”, and “free as in a free puppy”, but never “free as in $8000 a year”. If that’s what Blackboard considers free, then I’ve got some free advice they might be interested in.

UPDATE: John Porter from Blackboard tells me that the section merge utility is a free download (you don’t need to buy the consulting package) and that the $8,000 is to fix any issues that arise with it until the crosslisting feature is added to the base product. See comments below.

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: John Porter checked further into the section merge utility and contacted me to correct the information. Apparently the section merger utility is free (with an $8,000 annual maintenance) for hosted clients, but non-hosted clients need to purchase the discounted $15,000 implementation package to get the section merge tool included. What I just realized that we didn’t discuss, was how much it would cost (or if it’s even possible) to purchase just the section merge utility, without the implementation engagement. John also arranged a conference call with him and Ben Wang (from product development) where we discussed some of the issues below about how the learning environment connector works; expect a new post correcting some of the information below in the near future.

The other big takeaway from this session is that everyone is very confused about co-production and exactly how the learning environment connector works. We actually didn’t manage to make it through all the slides because there were so many questions from the audience about the LEC and co-production. Some of the things I learned about co-production:

• It takes about two to three hours to configure the learning environment connector to integrate a CE/Vista 8 system with a BB 9 system
• Moving a course from the CE/Vista system to the BB9 system is a true move… files are removed from the CE/Vista system.
• There’s no way to move back from BB9 to CE/Vista (so make a copy before you move!)
• Data only flows from the CE/Vista system to BB9, not the other way around. As long as the LEC is configured, all integration should run from the SIS to the CE/Vista system, where it will be moved to BB9 by the LEC.
• There seemed to be some mixed information on exactly how easy it is to *remove* the LEC from the co-production system when you are done with it. Definitely something we’ll be wanting to try out in a staging system before we ever set it up on production.
• There’s no way for faculty to move their own sections. There *are* commandline utilities though, so I’m thinking we could write a migration tool similar to what we did to move from CE4 to Vista to allow faculty to move their own sections. Yet another feature of our self-service application.
• It doesn’t affect us, but apparently the LEC and co-production are not an option for CE Basic systems; those have to be fresh installs and migrations. Co-production is only allowed for CE Enterprise and Vista.
• At this point, CE/Vista is fully supported until January 2013, but it will skip operational support at that time and go directly to unsupported. Will this change again in the future? Probably if it needs to; if most CE/Vista schools have not gone to BB9.x by then, I’m sure they’ll extend it. They’re still supporting CE4, after all.