Category: Learning Management Sys


  • Hi Blackboard Support, Today, without warning, you changed Behind the Blackboard. Clients dislike surprises. We like knowing how things work. Give us access to the new thing before we have to deal with it. That way we become familiar with it. Even if you do not give advance viewing of the service, then advance warning…

  • We acquired Blackboard Mobile Learn Powerlink version 1.1.9 to solve a problem. Something was done on the Blackboard side before our institution administrators could successfully get to the registration page. This version fixed that issue by doing a registration behind the scenes. Naturally the information it has is wrong, but at least now the institution administrators can…

  • Mark Wescott wrote to a Blackboard Learn 9 list, Imagine a world where Bb Inc. provides browser checkers for each Rev/SP combo, and all we (aka “The Customers”) have to do is place a link on our Bb logon page to the browser checker that matches our production environment…. mmmm serenity. Said browser checkers would:…

  • Yesterday was the 100th day of the year, so I figured I would figure out my progress with those pesky resolutions. Complete unfinished novel series. I finished the Harry Potter series. I am simultaneously working on the Sword of Truth and Ender series. The Shadow Rising was such an awful book I gave up on…

  • For over a month now my team has been heads down to provide some sandbox environments for the University System of Georgia Learning Management System Transition Task Force. The evaluators are looking at a sandbox for each contender. Various technical teams are also determining how the product fits with our experience and our operations. Growing…

  • Last week about this time both Blackboard Mobile Learn and SafeAssign were experiencing an outage. Both were resolved by the afternoon. However, Support Bulletins, how I have come to expect to receive notifications about Blackboard issues came only for SafeAssign. I complained about this to my support representative by CC’ing him on an internal message.…

  • Why Ten

    The question of why we run ten clusters came up recently. Off the top of my head, the answer was okay. Here is my more thoughtful response. Whenever I have been in a conversation with a BEA (more recently Oracle) person on Weblogic, the number of nodes we run has invariably surprised them. Major banks…

  • Higher education is very litigious. Students sue universities over encroaching on personal beliefs. People who fail to get accepted sue over discrimination or reverse discrimination. Employees claim wrongful termination. Publishers claim copyright infringement. Software companies battling over patents. Equal funding of historically black colleges and universities to non-black counterparts. We are involved in selecting a new…

  • New Root CA

    One of our clients introduced a new LDAP server for authentication. Like a good partner, they implemented it in the test environment, found it did not work and alerted us to the problem. They also informed us the problem would be the new Thawte Root CA was not implemented on many operating systems and applications.…