Update on the LEC from Blackboard

John Porter contacted me after he read this post and said that there were some inaccuracies that he wanted to get cleared up. I certainly don’t want to be spreading incorrect information so I agreed to a conference call with him and Ben Wang. I didn’t get Ben’s job title, but I gather that he works in product development, specifically on the learning environment connector (LEC). Blockquotes below are from my original post.

I had written:

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.

It turns out that the section merge tool is a free download (with an $8,000 annual maintenance fee) for hosted clients. Those of us that are self-hosted have to purchase the $15,000 implementation services package (which includes installation and LEC configuration services, along with BB9 administration training) to have access to the free download. I forgot to ask whether the section merge utility was available for purchase individually. I did ask if the basic methods that the utility used were documented, to allow us to write our own section merge tool. My understanding (which is very limited at this point) is that the utility basically combines the enrollments for multiple sections into one section and, possibly, creates groups with the “child” section enrollments so the instructor can tell them apart. It seems that this would be doable, but without further information on what exactly the section merge tool does, it’s hard to tell.

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

John says that this can be done in under an hour if you know what settings you need; the 2-3 hours allows for some reading of documentation and looking up settings. Ben also mentioned that if you have a high volume of users and/or sections, the initial sync can take longer, even several hours longer in some cases.

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 are two ways to “move” a section from CE/Vista to BB9. The first method is to use the Move Course functionality from the admin GUI. This operation does the following:

1. Performs an online backup of the section in CE/Vista. This backup is retained on the CE/Vista system and can be used to restore the content (including student data) if necessary.
2. Resets the CE/Vista section to remove student data.
3. Activates the BB9 version of the section and copies the content from CE/Vista to BB9.
4. Marks the CE/Vista section as “moved” in the database so the LEC knows to pass enrollment information to the BB9 system. This also makes the section no longer available in the CE/Vista system.

The other method is to manually create the new section in BB9 and manually enroll the instructor and students. When the instructor is setting up the section in BB9 he or she has the option to copy content from another section; the sections available to copy from include all of their sections in CE/Vista, so they simply select the appropriate section and content is copied over. This does not affect the CE/Vista section, so it still exists in its normal state. This would actually allow the instructor to teach from both sections during the same semester. For example, they might want to use CE/Vista for most activity, since that’s what they’re used to, but they may want to experiment with the new assessment options in BB9 for their online quizzes.

The downside to the second option is manually managing the enrollments. You can work around this by modifying your integration to create two sections (with different names) for a single section coming from your student information system (SIS). You could then use the first method to move one of the sections to BB9. This way both sections would have enrollments updated by your SIS. Confusing? Oh yeah… but it’s nice to have options.

There’s no way to move back from BB9 to CE/Vista (so make a copy before you move!)

While it’s true that courses cannot be moved back from BB9 to CE/Vista, it’s also true that the “move” process creates a backup of the original section in CE/Vista, so at least you have that to start from if you want to go back.

John also mentioned that BB9 backups are not encrypted. This means that it’s possible to pull files directly from a BB9 backup. The only caveat is that the files are not named the same as they were in the interface (they have a Tomcat ID for a filename), but it’s possible to look up the original filename in the database to determine which file you are looking for. This is made even easier by the fact that the database is open in BB9, so the correct query should be easy to create.

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.

This is true. It’s also true that if you have more than one system you want to run in co-production (which is craziness… what are you people thinking? ), you need to run separate integrations to each of these systems and allow the LEC to move the enrollment information to BB9 from each system. There’s currently no way to have one system filter enrollments to various other systems (for example, have your CE/Vista integration work to load enrollments to BB9 and also to Moodle or Sakai, all through the LEC). Surprisingly, John tells me that this won’t always be the case; Blackboard is working to make the LEC more “two-way” to allow this sort of functionality. Of course, the standard “forward-looking statements” rule applies here, so no guarantees, but it’s nice to know they’re at least thinking along these lines.

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.

The big catch in removing the LEC is making sure that all of your authentication and integration components work directly with BB9 prior to shutting off the LEC. Once that’s done (and tested!) the LEC removal is fairly straightforward and mostly automated. I mentioned that it seemed that the presenters at BBWorld were implying that we might need/want professional services to help with this and he pointed out that many schools just don’t have the technical resources necessary to perform the integration/authentication pieces themselves. For many schools it was more cost effective to hire Blackboard to do the initial authentication/integration work with CE/Vista; these schools will probably also need to budget a return trip to make the switch to direct BB9 authentication/integration. This makes sense, and it’s a good thing to know if that’s the case at your institution.

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.

John confirmed that the command line script to move sections already exists. We could build any sort of front-end application that faculty could use to select sections for moving, and then pass the section id to the existing script to complete the move process. This is significantly easier than the “Rube Goldberg“-like solution we came up with to move from CE4 to Vista. It’s also possible to simply create blank sections in BB9 and allow the faculty to copy their old content from CE/Vista.

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.

This is true, but John pointed out that schools that are using CE Basic tend to be smaller schools for which the whole co-production setup is probably overkill.

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.

John also agree with this statement. Blackboard has no intention of abandoning a large number of its customers on old unsupported platforms. Of course, you probably don’t want to be the last one on your block to make the move….