Publisher integrations to be evaluated

As many of you know, an integration to the McGraw-Hill Connect and Create platforms was implemented in Blackboard in Summer 2013. Many instructors have been asking about integrations for additional publishers.

Now that the upgrade to Service Pack 13 is complete, the Blackboard Steering Committee will begin evaluating publisher integrations. Our evaluation will be guided by:

  • The need and number of OSU instructors and students who use a given publisher’s content (the OSU Bookstore is assisting with this analysis).
  • The quality of technical support and technical environment (e.g., uptime; building block configuration, etc.) that a publisher offers. Some are definitely better than others.
  • The value that our learning community will experience (e.g., quality of content integration to the Bb site, and quality of gradebook integration).

We are well aware of the desire to have effective integration between online publisher content and our LMS, and will keep you updated via this blog

Scheduled Blackboard Maintenance April – December 2013

We are happy to announce a series of scheduled outages to perform maintenance on Blackboard.

We are also planning two longer outages later this year for proposed service pack upgrades.

The planned maintenance and upgrades will benefit Blackboard users and keep our system stable and up-to-date.

Outage schedule:

– 3-hour (6-9AM) outages on the following Saturdays for general maintenance activities
April 20 2013 – complete
May 18 2013 – complete
July 6 2013 – complete
August 3 2013  – complete
October 19 2013  – complete
November 28 2013 (Thanksgiving Day) – this outage will last from 6 am – 6 pm  – complete

– 3 day outages for proposed service pack upgrades:
September 13-15 2013: Service Pack 9 – complete
December 20-22 2013

Welcome to the Blackboard Steering Committee Site

 About the Blackboard Steering Committee

What we do – The Blackboard Steering Committee ensures strategic alignment of OSU’s learning management system with campus needs. Our charter is to establish a repeatable process to gather, evaluate and prioritize requests for features and functionality in Blackboard. Our evaluation criteria are based on impact to students, instructors and data, as well as potential legal, technical, FERPA and disability access issues.

The committee also provides regular reporting to the OSU community on changes and updates to Blackboard.

Who we are – OSU faculty, the Registrar’s office, IT, Technology Across the Curriculum, the Library, Center for Teaching and Learning, and Ecampus are all represented on the committee (ASOSU pending).