Most people are familiar with the boxes and buttons that comprise the Blackboard learning system. Simple right? You log on and there are your classes with your homework, syllabi, and grades in them. Simplicity is the goal, but it takes a lot of complexity behind the scenes to make that simplicity available to thousands of people. This article gives an overview of some of the technical details of implementing and migrating Blackboard at UAA.

The thousand-foot view of Blackboard is that it's a web server and a database. It uses the open source web server apache. Open Source zealots will be interested to know that Blackboard was originally a product called CourseInfo and was built using apache, mod_perl, and a mysql database. Blackboard has grown a lot since then. Version 6 is actually 2 separate apache web servers, a tomcat server, a chat server, and relies on an industrial strength oracle database. It's developed using java servlets, mod_perl apache plugins, and perl CGI scripts.

From the Internet's perspective a user and Blackboard are communicating on 4 different channels (tcp ports). Port 80 is the main web server's port. Port 80 is the default http port. Tomcat, running Blackboard's java application framework, is listening on TCP port 8007. Finally, for anybody who uses virtual classroom or lightweight chat there are TCP connections on ports 80010 and 80011. Thankfully only your network administrators need to know that. Many UAA constituents connecting from high security corporate or government networks will need to work with their network administrators to allow access on some of these ports.

Files kept in Blackboard, things like your syllabi and handouts, are stored directly on the web server. UAA currently has about 30 gigabytes of this type of content within the Blackboard system. Relationships like who is teaching a class, who is taking it, and what content belongs in it are stored in the oracle database on a separate server. That is about 4 gigabytes of data.

The process of migrating from Bb5 to Bb6 has to handle both parts of the application; the files and the database. Blackboard supplies software to aid in moving the data between versions. They call it the Òmigration tool.Ó The migration tool copies the files from one computer to another and processes the database to work with the new version. The process itself has taken a few days in a test environment.

Most instructors are still teaching on Blackboard 5. Many instructors have been teaching on Bb6 this Fall. Their course content will be merged into the new version. So that the finished product that emerges this January will be a merge of all Blackboard courses taught at UAA. We're going to keep the old Bb5 and Bb6 servers online to retrieve data that the merge might have missed. The content on those backup servers will be ÒfrozenÓ.

IT Services is really excited to be bringing version 6 into production this January. We're confident the community will like the new features, without learning a completely new tool. We're very appreciative of our faculty testers and the members of the migration team. Look for our last article in this series about Blackboard after the full migration this December where will review the migration details.

Jim Weller is a System Engineer with UAA's IT Services Department. Jim works with application/database servers and streaming media.