UAA’s Blackboard course management system is comprised currently of two products:  the Blackboard Learning System (LS) and the Blackboard Community Portal (CP).  On July 10^th UAA will alter our Blackboard course management system by removing the Blackboard CP product.  There will be no changes made to the Blackboard LS product.  This change has been precipitated by changes and increases in Blackboard’s licensing structure and pricing.

 

For the past two years, UAA has used a small portion of the Blackboard CP product to provide certain functionality within user’s Blackboard homepage.  Blackboard CP provides “portlets” or “boxlets” that permit users to view and manipulate certain add-on capabilities like dictionary and the New York Times newsfeed.  After the license change is implemented on July 10 by IT Services engineering staff, the only “boxlets” available will be “My Courses” and “Announcements”.  No other changes within the Blackboard LS will be made.

 

UAA has a history of being a leader in eLearning. We demonstrated that with early adoption of the Blackboard LS product in 1999. In 2001, UAA upgraded our Blackboard LS license and installed Banner integration capabilities to synchronize Banner course information with Blackboard course shells.  UAA moved to the Blackboard LS v6 product in January of 2004. We anticipate another upgrade to our current v6 product in late July, 2005.

 

IT Services’ analysis of Blackboard CP usage shows that a very small minority (about 8%) of Blackboard users take advantage of this functionality. Almost all the functions, like the most popular dictionary and thesaurus, are readily available in fast free websites like http://m-w.com. News feeds like Time Magazine and the New York Times can be viewed directly from their websites or as RSS news syndications for direct delivery to your RSS reader or web browser.

 

If you have any questions regarding this change, please contact the IT Callcenter at 786-4646 option 1 or email callcenter@uaa.alaska.edu