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Migration Update – January 30th

Posted by on Friday, January 30, 2015 in Migration 2014.

The migration from OAK to Blackboard managed hosting is now complete. Most courses from Fall 2013 to present are now available in Blackboard, as are all organizations. We have only a few remaining issues to resolve:

  • Very Large Courses: OAK courses over 4GB in size cannot be automatically migrated to Blackboard. If you are an instructor for a course of this size, the Blackboard support team will reach out to you in February to discuss options for moving course material to Blackboard.
  • SafeAssign: Blackboard’s plagiarism detection tool, SafeAssign, is available to run new reports on student papers. Older reports generated by the tool in OAK are not yet available, but they have been archived and should be migrated to Blackboard in the next few weeks. Update, February 3rd: SafeAssign reports have now been restored to Blackboard.
  • Inline Grading: We have received several reports of inline grading comments (that is, comments made directly on student work using the inline grading tool) not making the migration from OAK to Blackboard. We are investigating this issue.

Note that OAK, Vanderbilt’s local installation of Blackboard, still exists. It’s running on a single server managed by VUIT. Access to the legacy OAK system is limited to a handful of staff in VUIT and EMOS (Enrollment Management), per our contract with Blackboard. (Direct access for instructors or students would increase our costs significantly.)

Maintaining OAK, albeit with limited access, allows us to continue migrating archived courses and content to Blackboard as needed in the future. At some point, OAK will be shut down entirely, but not before a comprehensive data retention policy is put into place for Blackboard.

If you have questions about the migration from OAK to Blackboard or other questions about the use of Blackboard, please email blackboard@vanderbilt.edu. Staff from VUIT and EMOS are monitoring this email account and typically respond within 24 hours.