Where did spring semester go? It seems we were just attending the start of semester Community meeting a few days ago and now final exams are looming. Just as the semesters seem to pass faster and faster, the pace of technological change seems to be increasing too. As you may have noticed with our implementation of Office 365, we’re seeing new features regularly not major upgrades. This change in the release of features is a function of the way the applications are delivered. Many of the modern systems we use are licensed as Software as a Service (SaaS). One of the benefits of SaaS applications is the ease with which they can be updated with little or no downtime.
As we look forward to reviewing and replacing our LMS, we will also be faced with more frequent change. All the potential LMS’s that the LMS Task Force will be evaluating are SaaS solutions. At present our managed hosted Blackboard instance must be taken out of service for up to 12 hours for an update or upgrade to be applied. In the SaaS environment, this is not the case, features are released SaaS applications at regular intervals. In the case of Blackboard and other LMS’s new features, or updates, are released to the system every 3 to 4 weeks.
To help the community prepare for the increasing pace of change in the LMS realm, we will begin updating or upgrading Blackboard during each semester break until we migrate to our new LMS.
The tentative near-term schedule looks like this:
- April – update Building Blocks and cumulative update
- August – upgrade to Bb Learn 9.1, Q4 2017
- December – upgrade to Bb Learn 9.1 Q2 2018
In between these planned updates will come updates to address security or significant functionality fixes. As always, we will try to schedule the work during the pre-negotiated maintenance windows of Wednesday evenings between 8 – 10 PM for non-service impacting changes and Friday evenings between 8 PM and midnight for service impacting work. The exceptions to these will be for third-party vendors who schedule updates independent of Wentworth and for emergency maintenance.
As always, we will post announcements in Blackboard for updates and maintenance whether it interrupts service or not. For any work that we anticipate will impact Blackboard as a whole, we will send campus announcements and post within the Service Status system. For third-party vendor tool maintenance, we will announce in Blackboard and may, depending on the level of use of the tool we may also send a campus announcement.