OAK’s Transition to Blackboard – Letter to Faculty

Posted by Derek Bruff on Friday, November 21, 2014 in Migration 2014.

Dear faculty colleagues:

As we migrate OAK course materials from their current (still-problematic) on-campus existence to the new hosted Blackboard environment, there will be periods of black-out where you will not be able to access your course materials.

We have staggered this work to minimize down time.

Schedule

November 10 – Migration began for Fall 2013 courses.
November 17 – Migration began for Spring 2014 courses.
December 1 – Migration begins for Summer 2014 courses, as well as “organizations” and other non-courses on OAK.
December 15 – Migration begins for Spring 2015 courses.
December 21 – Migration begins for Fall 2014 courses and for any course that has been “reactivated” by faculty member request.
December 21-22 – OAK/Blackboard completely unavailable.
December 23 – Spring 2015 courses available on Blackboard managed hosting, along with older (pre-Fall 2014) courses.
December 29 – Fall 2014 courses available on Blackboard managed hosting.

This is, as you can see, a complex process, and there are several ways in which this may impact your work.

Spring 2015 courses: this is relatively good news. Any work you do now (and up through Dec 14^th) on your Spring 2015 courses will be ported over into the new system and ready to work with on Dec 23^th. Alternatively, you can wait and build your courses in the new hosted environment starting on Dec 23^th. Either way, the only days that these courses should be unavailable are Dec 15-22.

Fall 2014 courses: this has some red flags. Everything you do up until Dec 20^th will carry over and be available on or before Dec 29th. However, during the transition for these courses (Dec 21-28), all materials, including the OAK gradebook, will be unavailable. This will affect those faculty whose grades are due in January. This will also affect students with incompletes, or other students who have study needs. (Also, given the impact of course size on the transition process, some e-reserves are being removed a bit early this year so they don’t get ported over – if that is a problem for you, please contact your e-reserve coordinator.)

Reactivated courses – ones that you had to request earlier this semester – these will be bundled in with Fall 2014 courses.

Fall 2013, Spring 2014, and Summer 2014 courses, plus organizations and non-traditional courses: Some notable constraints. These are being migrated in batches during November and early December as noted above. Once they have been shifted to the new environment, they will be in a kind of limbo. You may, if needed, request reactivation (through oak@vanderbilt.edu) in order to copy the content, but any work you do directly within these earlier courses will not be reflected in the January copy of the course. This makes these courses different from those of the current academic year! (You can, however, reactivate an older course and copy its materials into a Spring 2015 course prior to Dec 15 – and the Spring 2015 copy would migrate over into the new environment.)

For those of you overseeing incompletes, there are several challenges. Once a course has been inactivated to migrate it to the hosted Blackboard environment, students will not have access to the course materials unless you make it live. If you do make it live and the students submit things through OAK, those copies would only be temporary and would drop away in December. Similarly, if you make a change to an older gradebook in a course that has been reactivated, you will need to keep a paper copy because those grades won’t roll forward.

For those with non-traditional course schedules in which students might need to consult things during Dec 21-22, we recommend a conversation with the Center for Teaching or with your local DTS guru, who can help you find alternatives for hosting materials.

If you have any questions about this process, please email oak@vanderbilt.edu. You are also welcome to read the minutes of meetings of the faculty advisory council that is helping to guide this transitional process; they are found at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/oak/oak-fac.php.

Thank you for your patience and understanding. Our goal is a stable and functional Blackboard environment, and our experience with Nursing earlier this semester suggests strongly that this transition will benefit campus in the long run.

Yours,

Derek Bruff, Director, Center for Teaching

Cynthia Cyrus, Vice Provost for Learning and Residential Affairs