http://blackboard.brooklyn.cuny.edu/
"Sylvie Richards serves as our Blackboard specialist. Her strength is her ability to communicate with faculty. Sylvie's extraordinary skills have propelled Brooklyn into the leadership role within CUNY." Howard Spivak, Director for Library Systems & Academic IT
"Spring semester 2004 marked a milestone for Blackboard at Brooklyn: we have the greatest number of courses offered in any semester thus far. In spring of 2003, approximately 90 courses were offered on Blackboard. This semester, we have approximately 120 courses, a 25% growth rate over last year. Last fall, we had approximately 105 courses. The growth rate from last semester to this semester was 12.5%. There are now 539 courses up on the system!" Sylvia Richards, Multimedia Specialist
Blackboard has truly revolutionized online teaching and learning at Brooklyn College. This flexible, friendly e-learning platform enables faculty to build course sites without learning to write code or use complex authoring systems. At the same time, AIT staff have bettered Blackboard, creating new and exciting tools that complement and work within this platform. Multimedia Specialist Sylvie Richards made Blackboard presentations in August 2003 and January 2004 for incoming graduate and undergraduate students (new freshmen and transfer students); these sessions were very well attended.
Web-based teaching at Brooklyn College has taken an enormous leap forward, and the number of course sites (see Faculty Course Sites, below, for detail) has spiraled. In 2003-2004 the number of Blackboard course sites continued to grow, increasing 27% from 427 to 539. The number of instructors using Blackboard rose 19% from 265 to 313, and the number of students using Blackboard almost doubled, rising from 4,488 to 9,651. The overall impact of Blackboard usage on teaching and learning at Brooklyn College has been felt across the disciplines, and technology literacy among students is increasing at a rapid pace.
| Number of Courses | 539 |
| Number of Students | 9,651 |
| Number of Instructors | 313 |
| Average Hits Per Day | 6,312 |
This year we have had real problems obtaining accurate Blackboard statistics, largely because of the migration to whose statistics module recorded no data between September 2–3 and March 2004. Data from the end of the year, however, give us a more or less accurate (though very conservative) end-of-year summary.
In the summer 2003 Brooklyn College took the decision to migrate to version 6 of Blackboard ahead of the migration to the Enterprise version which would sit on CUNY central servers: we were the only CUNY campus to take this step, but we did not want our faculty to confront simultaneously the double problems of (a) migrating to Version 6 and (b) moving to Enterprise. Thus we decided to bring up version 6 and resolve its issues sooner rather than later. An added incentive to migrate to version 6 was the fact that we were maxing out on the number of courses permitted with a version 1 license.
And we've never looked back. Certainly we do not envy the schools now faced with implementing both version 6 and Enterprise, simultaneously.
Blackboard is higher education's most widely deployed e-teaching and learning environment: even early iterations offered a robust environment for content management and sharing, online assessments, student tracking, assignment management, and virtual collaboration. At the Enterprise level, Blackboard integrates other administrative systems and authentication protocols with its own software, saving quantities of staff and faculty time when it comes to setting up new course sites, enrolling students, and so forth. The new Building Blocks architecture allows for considerable customization and interoperability with third-party providers, like those who sell portfolio products.
The path forward to the Enterprise version has been a bumpy one, with its share of detours. In the fall 2003, the University began to negotiate with Blackboard for a single CUNY-wide license and to run the software on University servers located in Manhattan. This arrangement will not be without cost to the local campuses, although these costs remain unclear: the University plans to charge colleges a per-user fee and Brooklyn has budgeted Student Technology Fee funds for 2004-2005 to cover these costs and some selected Building Blocks.
At Brooklyn, we anticipate a fall 2004 Enterprise implementation. AIT staff have taken two steps to insulate Brooklyn's faculty and students from a rough migration:
We have already brought up version 6 and are running smoothly with it.
We have positioned ourselves last in the campus queue for Enterprise adoption, enabling us to learn from the problems others experience and
perhaps avoid a good many of them for ourselves.
Even so, it is likely that we will do a course-by-course transfer and testing process, continuing to offer faculty and students full functionality on version 6 (running on our own servers) while we sort out the issues attendant on moving to Enterprise. It is difficult to imagine faculty creating courses within Enterprise at the present, when 24-48 hours are required before a course is activated. We hope that every course will make the trip–that is, that no courses will be completely lost, so that faculty have to start de novo on Enterprise: this would certainly have a chilling effect on teaching with technology at Brooklyn College.
We also worry about the loss of our ability to serve faculty by troubleshooting Enterprise courses, which will reside beyond our ministrations on CUNY servers. An unanticipated issue is the CUNY portal's requirement that faculty use their social security numbers to establish courses: some faculty flatly refuse. This could be a marketing issue for Blackboard Enterprise, particularly when some faculty are already wary of centralized services. Thus we await the fall 2004 with both optimism and trepidation.