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….

PowerSight Presentation from BBWorld09

What is the PowerSight Kit?

What is the PowerSight Kit? It’s a series of views in the database that are denormalized to make them easier to query. They include:

• rpt_gradebook
• rpt_learning_context
• rpt_learning_context_size
• rpt_member
• rpt_person
• rpt_template
• rpt_tracking

All of these views have interesting information in them, but for my purposes, I spent my time analyzing rpt_tracking. Rpt_tracking contains a record for every action taken in Vista, along with who took the action, which section it was in, which tool was used, and exactly when (down to the millisecond!). So you can see how parsing through this data could yield some useful results.

Special Notes about Chico

A couple notes about things we do at CSU, Chico that might be different than other institutions:

• We create a blank section for every section offered in the student information system. This results in many sections that never get used, but it also lowers the bar for faculty to jump in and use the system. It’s important for us to track how many sections actually end up getting used.
• We have our learning context hierarchy set up so that we have a division for every college (e.g. College of Business) and a group within each division for every department (e.g. Department of Management). This allows us to track usage by college and department. If you don’t do it that way, you could also gather this information by cleverly naming your sections, using other fields of the sections (like Organization Name, Organization Unit, etc).
• We use crosslisting. About 25% of the sections that get used are actually crosslisted. This has implications for gathering statistics because the “hits” in rpt_tracking are assigned to the parent section, but we want to track those hits by the child section. More about that next.

The Challenge of Crosslisted Sections

As mentioned above, crosslisted sections pose a special challenge. We’d like to report our usage based on the child sections (especially important when sections from different departments are crosslisted together). The best way I found to do this involves querying the rpt_tracking table by enrollments, rather than just by section. This way, any hits made by a student in a particular child section will be accumulated towards the usage of that child, rather than the parent.

The Basic Idea

So the basic concept I used is this:

• Query the database for a list of sections in a given term
• For each section in the list:
  • Get a list of enrollments for the current section
  • For each enrollment:
    • Get all tracking information from rpt_tracking for the current section and current enrollment
    • Step through each record, adding to various accumulators (I used Perl hashes, and hashes of hashes, rather extensively). For example, with a given record that involves a message-read action on the mail tool, I would accumulate a hit on the section, a hit by the person, a hit on the mail tool, a hit on the message-read action of the mail tool, etc.
  • Go on to next enrollment
• Go on to next section
• When done with all sections, write output files based on all the data accumulated

SQL Used

Here are the main sql statements I used to gather the information:

To get all sections in a given term:

select tm.assigned_lcid, lc.source_id, lc.name, lc.description, lc.delivery_unit_type
from webct.lc_term_mapping tm, webct.lc_term t, webct.learning_context lc
where tm.lc_term_id = t.id and tm.assigned_lcid = lc.id and t.source_id = ?;

Note: you’ll notice that I didn’t use the rpt_learning_context view for this query; it turns out that the rpt_learning_context view doesn’t include what term a particular section is in.

Finding the parent section for a crosslisted child:

select master_lcid from webct.xlist_lc_mapping where child_lcid = ?

Finding the division (college, in our case) for a particular section:

select lc.name from webct.learning_context_index lci, webct.learning_context lc
where lc.id = lci.left_lc_id  and lci.hierarchy_level = 4 and right_lc_id = ?";

Finding the group (department, in our case) for a particular section:

select lc.name from webct.learning_context_index lci, webct.learning_context lc
where lc.id = lci.left_lc_id  and lci.hierarchy_level = 3 and right_lc_id = ?";

Getting a list of enrolled students for a given section:

select distinct p.webct_id
from webct.member m, webct.role r, webct.role_definition rd, webct.person p
where m.id = r.member_id and r.role_definition_id = rd.id
and m.person_id = p.id and m.learning_context_id = ?
and m.delete_status = 0 and rd.name = 'SSTU' and p.webct_id != ?";

Note: The demo student (used for Student View by instructors) is always named “webct_demo_” plus the learning context id of the section. This is the webct_id that is excluded by the last part of the where clause above.

Getting all activity for a given user in a given section:

select t.tracking_id, t.session_id, t.event_time_mil, p.webct_id,
t.tool_name, t.action_name, t.page_name, t.dwell_time
from webct.rpt_tracking t, webct.person p
where t.person_id = p.id and t.learning_context_id = ?
and t.event_time_mil >= ? and t.event_time_mil <= ? and p.webct_id = ?;

Note: event_time_mil is stored as milliseconds since Jan 1, 1970 UTC. If you divide by 1000 (to convert to seconds) and then pass this value to the Perl localtime function, it will return the actual date/time in your time zone.

Output Files

The files I output for each term include:

• summary_stats.txt – a text file with high level summaries of counts of faculty, students, and tools used, overall and by college and department.
• summary_stats.csv – a CSV file with essentially the same information as the text file, but in a format that allows easier manipulation (filtering, chart making, etc).
• detailed_stats.csv – a CSV file that contains information about each section, including primary instructors, number of enrolled students, crosslist status, total hits, and hits on each individual tool.
• student_list.csv – a list of unique students
• faculty_list.csv – a list of unique faculty
• pageview_stats.csv – a list of all content pages (learning module pages) and the number of hits on them (This was a special request from a faculty member who essentially wrote a text book for the class as a learning module. They wanted to know which pages got the most and least attention from the students).
• section_activity_stats.csv – a summary count of hits and sessions per section, including the average per week and per day of the term.
• person_activity_stats.csv – same as above, but by person instead of by section.

Pivot Tables

I demonstrated a pivot table built from the data in rpt_tracking as an example of what could be done with a data warehouse and a business intelligence package that can deal with multi-dimensional cubes. The pivot table is built by essentially dumping every record for the term into a flat file and then importing it to a database and using Excel to make the pivot table. Unfortunately, Microsoft Access has a 2GB file size limit, so I could only fit one week’s worth of date into it for the demonstration, but pivot tables are a powerful tool to “slice and dice” lots of data to look for interesting details. For instance, I was able to show which colleges on our campus used the Turnitin powerlink, and then drill down to show which departments in that college used it, then drill down again to see which sections. This kind of analysis is invaluable. Our plan is to move the tracking data into our data warehouse to enable this type of analysis across all sections and all terms, so perhaps next year’s BBWorld will include a presentation on how that went.

Support: Blackboard has, rightfully, earned a reputation for horrible customer support. As a former WebCT campus, the transition period from WebCT support to Blackboard support was awful. Blackboard has acknowledged that mistakes were made and they admit that they mishandled the merger of the two support organizations. Over the past couple years though, they have made great improvements in support (at least from my perspective). Most of our tickets have been resolved. New tickets opened have been addressed quickly and thoroughly. Blackboard support staff have taken to monitoring Twitter, client email lists, and attending the bi-weekly VistaSWAT Wimba sessions and offering assistance directly, if they can, or indirectly, by getting questions to the people who can answer them. There have been several support staff that have been involved in this capacity, but I don’t think any have been more… well… everywhere than John Porter (Senior Manager of Client Support). John has tirelessly worked to turn around the bad feelings that many have had about support, including training for Tier 1, a consistent presence on the WebCT-Users and WebCT-Admins listservs, and a solid effort on Twitter. Within a day of my latest blog postings from the conference, John contacted me about some inaccuracies that he wanted to get cleared up. I’ll be talking to him this week and will certainly be correcting any mistakes I made; but what really impresses me is that he keeps up with what’s out there and spends a significant amount of his time (even on the weekend!) working to create satisfied clients.

Buggy code: The early days of Vista 4.0 were rough and Blackboard ended up taking the brunt of the criticism for the crappy code involved. The reality, however, is that Vista 4.0 was coded by WebCT developers, many of whom were either laid off, or quit, when Blackboard bought the company. This left Blackboard developers with ~50 million lines of code, that they didn’t write, filled with literally thousands of bugs. Anyone who has worked with coding, specifically working on complex code that someone else wrote, can appreciate the magnitude of the task that was finding and correcting the bugs that existed. In my opinion, they’ve done a tremendous job. Some of the earlier service packs and hotfixes were tough and sometimes introduced more serious issues than they corrected, but once we got past application pack 1 things started getting much better. In fact, I can’t think of any upgrades that we’ve applied since app pack 1 that caused any significant issues. Application pack 2 was a huge win, and introduced a level of stability on our system that allowed us to take a deep breath and start focusing our resources on things other than just keeping the system up and running. Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t still issues with the code and things I would change, but the improvement has been dramatic and very welcome, and should be acknowledged.

Migrations: Getting from CE4 to Vista 4 was a challenge. We ended up having to write a bunch of utilities to facilitate the process, and other schools had to spend huge amounts of labor to get files from one system to the other. I was never involved in the Vista 3 to Vista 4 migration, but I’ve heard horror stories about the process. Now, I’m not saying that the new “co-production/learning environment connector” process is perfect, but it’s quite a bit better than anything I’ve seen in the LMS market.  Now, keep in mind that I haven’t actually used the process yet,  but it does look like it will make the experience smoother and less painful than any previous migrations. Now if only Blackboard would stop calling it an “upgrade”….

The app they demoed for the conference during the keynote was for Stanford. They showed how a student would be able to look up faculty or staff in the directory, access the course list, enroll in courses, and search/view maps of campus with their own location pinpointed by the iPhone’s GPS (interestingly, they didn’t demonstrate how the app would hook up with the LMS). The various data sources were very well integrated; you could look up a course in the course list and then either click the professor’s name to look her up in the directory, or click the room number to show it on the campus map. They described how they could pull in data from just about any source on campus: sports scores, advising, financial aid, etc. All in all, it appeared to be… well… terribly clever.

They claim that the application works on any web-enabled phone. To prove it, they showed a directory lookup on an iPhone simulator, as well as a directory lookup in a browser pointed to the mobile web site. Both applications returned the same contact information. At this point they said, “See? It works on both, so now we’ll just demo on the iPhone to make things easier.” Then they proceeded to demo all sorts of functionality that won’t work on many (most?) web-enabled phones: GPS location, multitouch zooming of maps, etc. It’s just a hunch, but I’m thinking that the experience on a regular ol’ phone like my Samsung Saga wouldn’t be nearly as rich as the iPhone experience. But all students have iPhones (or iPod Touches), right?

I stopped by the booth later to chat with the guys from TerriblyClever… I mean Blackboard MobilEdu… and asked them some questions about how they could come to my campus and pull together all these various data sources. Think about your campus; how easy would it be for you to get access to pull data from your directory, your course catalog, maps of your campus, sports scores, and campus announcements, so you could aggregate it in a single application? You store all of this data on a central database, right? You don’t? And even if you do, it’s no big deal to get access to query all of it, right? How about letting your app actually enroll students in a course? I’m guessing that your SIS administrators would have no problem letting a third party application, hosted on an off-campus server, have this ability. I know mine would be fine with it… not.

Anyway, I asked the MobilEdu guys how they go about this, and they told me that they like each campus to designate a person as a point of contact who can coordinate the efforts with all of the owners of the various data sources. They prefer that the data be exposed via web services, so their server can query it in real time, but they are willing to work with the data in whatever form you have it: CSV files, XML files, direct database access, etc. They told me that if they can’t query the data via web service, they’ll just pull it all over to their server in a batch process to facilitate supplying it to the end users. I’m thinking that the Information Security office might have some issues with our data on someone else’s servers, however, so it sounds like we would have to “webify” all of our data sources to make this work. I asked them, if we did all the work to setup the web services and provided them with the necessary documentation for how to call those services, would that reduce the cost to roll this service out? They said no. I guess it’s one price fits all.

Obviously, the concept works… they’ve done it for several large campuses. I’m just not sure our campus would be ready for it anytime soon… and I’m not sure we’re alone.

Probably the most important thing I can share with you is the link to his blog: http://sevenseconds.wordpress.com. That way you can read his wisdom directly. He has posted the slides from his presentations there as well.

Here are some of the highlights that struck me from this session:

When thinking about performance, it’s useful to think in terms of transactions. A transaction is any piece of work that the system does for the user. For instance, when a user clicks a button in the interface to, say, display a list of discussion posts, that button click has to:

1. Be turned into an http request by the user’s browser.
2. Encapsulated into TCP/IP traffic by the user’s network card.
3. Sent over the user’s ISPs network, and across the Internet until it gets to your system.
4. At that point, your load balancer has to process that packet and send it to the appropriate server.
5. That server has to figure out what the user is requesting and prepare a response.
6. Part of the requested response requires data from the database, so a database query is created.
7. The database server has to process the query. If all of the data for the query is not available in memory, it has to request it from disk.
8. Once the database has all of the data, it sends it back to the application server.
9. The application server then combines the data with the http elements (the rest of the page) and sends the whole thing back to the end-user.
10. Now comes the return trip across the Internet, into the ISP network, into the network card, delivered to the browser, which then has to parse through it to figure out how to run any necessary JavaScript and finally render the page so the user can see it.

System performance (response time) is essentially what you get when you add up the latency at each step of the user’s transaction. Any one of the points listed above could be the cause for poor performance. According to Steve Souders (author of Even Faster Web Sites), 80-90% of end-user response time for a web site is typically on the client end of the application. This may be less the case with CE/Vista, since it’s so heavily database driven, but it’s clear that a significant amount of processing time is spent completely outside the realm of the LMS.

When analyzing the end-user’s part of the transaction, Steve recommends a few tools to peek inside the http traffic to see what’s going on: YSlow (Yahoo), Page Speed (Google), and Fiddler2 (Microsoft). All three of these tools produce graphs and statistics about the http traffic, as seen from the client’s perspective. These tools can help you see where the latencies are and help you understand how to reduce them. Many times when “Vista is slow”, the root cause could very well be the types of content that are included on the page, a malfunctioning network device, or a saturated Internet connection, rather than the system serving the page itself. Also, all browsers are not the same: Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari all render content and process Javascript in different ways. Try loading an active CE/Vista discussion board in different browsers… you’ll notice a large difference in performance that has nothing to do with the application servers or the database. (By the way, Chrome seems to load the discussions fastest, even though it’s not a supported browser).

Of course, not all performance issues are on the client side, so we touched briefly on the application server side. Another potentially large source of latency is the Java virtual machine (JVM), particularly relating to its memory management algorithms. Steve recommends Java VisualVM, which is a powerful tool you can use to peek inside the memory model of the Java virtual machine’s heap. I’m actually very excited about this tool, since the JVM is such a black box. I’m definitely interested in peeking under the hood and watching it in action. Steve told me that it’s very low overhead and perfectly fine to run on your production app nodes (which is good, because looking at the JVM on your test system wouldn’t really tell you anything useful about your production load).

Another thing Steve recommends is to turn on compression (gzipping) and caching on the load balancers. I actually have no idea if our load balancers already do this, or even if they’re capable of it. I’ll have to be sure to check with our networking gurus when I get a chance.

Finally, the database is another obvious source of latency. Steve recommends the book Optimizing Oracle Performance by Cary Millsap and Jeffrey Holt as an excellent overview of how to speed up Oracle performance. Some of the advice in the book is related to query optimization, which we obviously can’t do anything about for CE/Vista, but there’s also information about optimizing indexes.

I was surprised to hear Steve say that it was perfectly acceptable for clients to modify indexes on their databases; Blackboard considers that “tuning”, not “unauthorized modification”. Of course, you’ll want to proceed carefully with this, making sure to do as much testing as possible and to put processes in place to measure performance to make sure you’re making things better and not worse. Someone asked why Blackboard didn’t optimize the indexes themselves and Steve responded that they did, but since the content is so customizable and varies so significantly from one institution to another, the initial “one-size-fits-all” indexing might not be optimized for a specific installation.

Some final points from my notes that didn’t really fit anywhere above:

• Outliers should never be ignored; they are the data points you want because they tell you how bad things can be. There is a tendency, when graphing performance statistics, to discard results that seem too far out of the norm. This is a mistake; you should focus attention on those outliers, because they can lead you to discover issues you would otherwise miss.
• Keep in mind that the system can affect transactions and that transactions can affect the system. Even though it’s helpful to focus on one or the other, you should never forget that they are interdependent.
• Identifying where the bulk of a transaction’s time is spent is key to figuring out how to improve overall latency. Spending time trying to streamline something that doesn’t take that long anyway isn’t going to have a big impact on user experience.
• Avoid diagnosis bias. It’s very easy to make assumptions about where the problem is or isn’t. Steve actually used me as an example, since we had been discussing some performance issues on our database that involved high I/O waits; I said that we had a fast SAN, so that probably wasn’t the problem. He pointed out that this type of bias might keep us from finding out that there’s something wrong with the SAN drivers (for instance) because we just wouldn’t look there. Just goes to show that sometimes your purpose in life is to serve as an example for others.
• When adding content to a section, the tendency is to load everything to Vista and then add it to the class. If you are really working to optimize a particular page, there is a process called domain sharding  that can be achieved by linking to content on other servers. Most browsers will only open a certain number of connections at a time to a particular domain, but they are capable of opening parallel connections to other domains to bring in page elements that are hosted there at the same time. In some cases, this can make a noticeable difference in page loading times. If you look carefully, you can see if a specific page would benefit from this by using YSlow, Page Speed, or Fiddler2 to look at the connections made for the page load.

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.

“You can’t over-communicate with your clients” – Ray Henderson

I love this quote. It’s so true. Even if your product sucks, or your support is awful, some of that… a lot of it… can be mitigated by open, honest communication. If I know that you know that you have issues and that you are working on them, I’ll be much more forgiving of your flaws. If you try to hide them or make excuses, I’ll likely hold a grudge for a long time.

Michael Chasen started it off by describing Blackboard’s long term strategy as having three main components:

1) Universal access to education – Ray mentioned that the Obama administration allocated funds to develop free online educational materials. Blackboard is committed to helping educators share resources with each other.

2) Measurable educational results – This is one of the holy grails of education. The ability to demonstrate, with empirical data, the level of success that your institution achieves in the process of educating students would be a tremendous benefit. This data could be used to monitor changes made to the academic process and clearly indicate what is working, and what is not. It could also be used to justify funding, both public and private, and to encourage healthy competition between institutions. Unfortunately, human beings being unique and infinitely variable, this idea is probably more of a vision to aim for, rather than a goal that can be achieved.

3) Expanding on mobile and social technologies (iPhone, Facebook, etc) – So much effort is being put into allowing students the ability to access educational materials on their mobile phones (particularly iPhones) and Facebook. I suppose the idea is to go where the students are, but I’m not sure if students really want to be reminded of school everywhere they go. Maybe I’m just old, but do students really center their academic life around Facebook? Do we know that students want this? I can’t help but wonder about the opportunity cost of this endeavor… what other things could be accomplished with the equivalent dollars and manpower that might have greater benefit to teaching and learning?

Michael then continued with a laundry list of more practical items (presumably all in BB 9.1):

• The Learning Environment Connector now works with Angel, allowing former Angel customers an easy path to “upgrade” to BB Learn, by participating in “co-production”. I remember when that process used to be called “migrating” from one LMS to another by running “two systems at the same time”… how times have changed. (OK, granted that the co-production setup *does* offer some ease of use that would not be present by running two standalone systems, but really this process is an “upgrade” in the same sense that you could buy a Mac and then “upgrade” it to Windows)
• New partnerships with Wimba, Echo360, and NBC Learn. Blackboard Learn customers now get a license for the Wimba Pronto Basic IM client, a 25 seat license for Echo360 lecture capture, and access to licensed NBC video archives. Cool stuff.
• The ability to transfer content to a Kindle. This is great… if you have a Kindle. Again, I’m not sure how useful this will be to the majority of students, but it does have a certain “wow” factor.
• Specific K-12 features: a parent dashboard, and a way to link content and activities to state standards. I wonder if these features are customizable enough to be of some use to higher ed as well. I know there’s been some talk of a “parent portal” at Chico, to allow parents (with the student’s permission, of course) to see financial aid information, schedule information, and grade information. Visibility right into the LMS might be a nice addition to that, at least for some students. As far as state standards go, I wonder if a college or department could enter their own standards and then tie their content and activities to them?
• CE/Vista features: Blackboard Learn 9.1 will have CE/Vista style learning modules (including a much better importing of learning modules from CE/Vista sections), as well as a course files area that works like the course files in CE and Vista (not requiring the Content System).

As always, the demo system running from Michael’s laptop’s harddrive worked smoothly, especially the parts that were really just screenshot image maps with clickable hotspots for navigation. Amazing how snappy BB9 is when you take out the pesky web server and database overhead.

And then it was Ray Henderson’s turn. He talked about openness, partnerships with clients, commitment to standards, and the importance of support; these are all things that he has mentioned in detail on his blog (http://www.rayhblog.com) . It all sounds great… let’s hope they deliver. He said that he’ll be back next year to go over his “report card” and be held accountable for how they’ve delivered. Given Blackboard’s tendency to burn through high level executives, I couldn’t help but wonder if he’ll still be around in 12 months.

He did announce a new policy for opening the database, which is something that Angel did. This is a big deal, not only because it will help all of us in our pursuits to use the product to the fullest, but because it’s a tacit acknowledgement that the data inside the database belongs to us, not to them. Opening the database, and sharing how it’s designed, brings us one step closer to being able to retain our data in a system-agnostic way. Kudos to Blackboard for making this move. It will take things like this to win our trust back. Ray was talking about the BB9 database, of course, but the Twittersphere was also buzzing with rumors that it would be extended to the CE/Vista database as well. Keeping my fingers crossed.

The final big announcement was that Blackboard has purchased the company TerriblyClever. More on that in another post; it deserves a post of it’s own.

All kidding aside, he makes a good point about the advisability of modifying source code for a product like an LMS. Every time you modify source, you mess up your next upgrade. Either you have to keep meticulous records about every change you make (which would, of course, be a great practice, but would likely never happen in real life), or have some or all of your changes undone after the upgrade. That is, if the upgrade even completes without running into issues based on your changed code. Even if you did have perfect records of every change you made, you’d have to evaluate each change before the upgrade to see whether it needed to be reapplied, applied in a different way, or skipped. Then you’d have to reapply all the changes after the upgrade, with the inevitable debugging and fixing of issues.

The alternative, according to George, is to consider the LMS a platform on which you can build a customized system using plugins (Building Blocks), API calls, and CSS modifications. Blackboard’s new focus on standards and interoperability will lead to the creation of many tools that will work with not only Blackboard’s LMS(s), but also with other compliant LMSs like Moodle and Sakai. It’s a rosy vision, but only time will tell if Blackboard is now ready to walk the walk instead of just talking the talk. The promise: as long as your customizations are written to the APIs, future upgrades won’t break them.

To this end, BB9 has many web services. BB9.1 will add many more. No official word exactly which web services will be available with 9.1 and what they will do, but I assume more to come in the future (wouldn’t want to make any “forward looking statements”, you know).

Also in BB9, Blackboard has opened up the CSS stylesheets, which allows customers to extensively customize the look and feel of the interface, in a way that will (or should) survive future upgrades. WebCT users have long asked for this… it’s nice to see it come to fruition.

George also put in a good word for www.edugarage.com (the Blackboard Developer’s Network site), the newly launched www.blackboardextensions.com (intended to be a central repository of Building Blocks, both free and commercial), and  www.oscelot.org (the Open Source Community for Educational Learning Objects and Tools).

Anyway, Seth was trying to say that our educational system hasn’t changed much. He postulated that our public education system was created in response to a perceived crisis that we would run out of factory workers and consumers for all the goods that were created in the factories. He attributed this belief to Andrew Carnegie and Woodrow Wilson and declared that it was time to change it. He didn’t actually offer any suggestions for how to change it; I suppose that’s our job. What he did offer is the concept that the best way to foster change was through tribes.

A tribe is a group of people aligned with a common goal and/or culture. He demonstrated that human beings need to feel that they’re part of something with an interesting demonstration.  He put up a slide that said to clap our hands, slowly and rhythmically.  It took four seconds for the entire audience (1500 people?) to sync up our claps with one another. It was actually fairly impressive.

Now I completely understand that humans have a need to “tribe up”. I think everyone is a member of several tribes. You could say that all of us at the conference are members of the Blackboard tribe, and that some of us are members of the WebCT tribe, while others are members of the Angel tribe. What I’m not clear on is whether or not it’s the tribe that is the agent of change, or does it just happen that tribes are so ubiquitous that they are always present when change happens? It certainly seems that some tribes are more about being agents of change (VistaSWAT) and others are less so (California State Legislature?).

In any case, here’s some other random things he said that struck a chord with me:

• Compliance doesn’t work to create value. Compliant work will always go to the lowest bidder. We can always find someone cheaper to follow the manual. Value is created by doing something different.
• To start a change, you need to be a “positive deviant”… someone who figures out how to “go to the edges” and do those things that are outside the norm. It’s tempting to stay in the center of the bell curve where there’s lots of company and it’s safe, but to foster change you need to take it to the thin area at the leading edge.

Oh, and he showed us a picture of the coolest corporate headquarters building ever: Longaberger Baskets

Longaberger headquarters

I’ll be trying to blog here daily while I’m there, publishing my take on the sessions I attend and the things I learn.