By Patrick Cowles
Daily Titan Asst. News Editor

At the turn of the millennium, Cal State Fullerton implemented Blackboard into its campus culture.

Nine years later, the learning management system (Web application) has become an important academic tool for students and faculty alike at CSUF, yet some professors have chosen to maintain their own site instead of utilizing Blackboard.

Tom Clanin, a communications professor, has used his own site hosted by the university since the 1990s for all of his classes.

Since Clanin has used his site prior to CSUF obtaining Blackboard, his choice to continue maintaining his site is, “mostly a learning curve, I know how to use it,” he said.

For students taking courses with Clanin, some have found his site better than going to Blackboard.

“It’s more readily available,” said Jackie Connor, a communications major.

Yet the Faculty Development Center offers workshops on Blackboard to instruct campus staff and faculty on how to use the application. Those workshops range, “comprehensively across the board on all the (features) that Blackboard makes available,” to, “promote their (faculty) use of more the utility beyond just loading the course material,” said Tony Rimmer, director of the Faculty Development Center.

Although attendance at the workshops is voluntary, “if a faculty member has a problem they can call us and we’ll help them out,” said Rimmer. The FDC tends to do a lot of one on one, added Rimmer.

About three years ago, Clanin decided to attend a workshop, but, “nothing really appealed to me,” he said. Despite finding the “Grade Center” feature easier for students to stay up to date on their grades, Clanin uses Excel spreadsheets since his grading policy is not compatible with the Blackboard feature.

For Genelle Belmas, a communications professor, “they’ve been really good in terms of my understanding of the technology,” she said. “I implemented a lot of what they taught me in terms of the actually teaching (features).”

The workshops are typically held once a month, Rimmer said. Before each semester begins the workshops teach basic features of Blackboard and will progress to advanced features throughout the semester, essentially “two levels of instruction,” added Rimmer.

Although Belmas has given the workshops a “10” on a scale from 1-10, other faculty have noticed that the larger the workshops are by attendance, the less beneficial their instruction can be.

“I’ve taken a bunch (of workshops) on Blackboard,” said Jeanette Solano, a comparative religion professor. “It depends on how crowded they are, I’ve been to some that were small and you got the help that you needed, but the last I went to was not as helpful as it could be.”

That last workshop was so large, they couldn’t really tend to all the different questions, added Solano. “But I learn in every workshop I go to.”

Although faculty are attending these workshops, the FDC has not noticed substantial utilization of Blackboard features through their interaction with the faculty.

“Generally about 50 to 60 percent of the faculty are using Blackboard,” said Rimmer. “And they probably use it at a fairly basic level.”

“As you move up in the complexities of the utilities (features), the utilization has been a drop off, remarkable,” added Rimmer.

Despite the workshops, some faculty have not found the necessity for newer more technologically savvy features, such as iLinc (web-based video conferencing) or Camtasia, a screen-video-capture program that allows faculty to record a video “screenshot” on their computer to produce video lectures using Adobe Flash.

Yet the reason for the simplistic use of Blackboard features by most faculty may be due to the nature of the course itself.

The courses that have required the utilization of these emerging and converging technologies are online courses, where faculty use Blackboard more intensively, stated Rimmer.

“It’s the only interaction I have with them (online students),” said Belmas. “Everything I do (for online students), I do through Blackboard.”

Belmas can utilize the “Discussion Board” feature to simulate classroom interaction while using iLinc to directly communicate with students individually.

For her in-classroom courses, “I use it basically as a website to hold all the lectures and post grades on,” Belmas added.

Yet she also maintains her own Web site, FreeSpeechRocks.com, to upload her Camtasia-Flash lectures because the files are large and take up significant space on the Blackboard servers, now operated in-house at CSUF.

That change of hosting occurred in late spring this year when an administrative decision was made to bring Blackboard hosting back on campus, said Rommel Hidalgo, director of Learning Management Systems at CSUF. When Blackboard first came to CSUF, it was hosted in-house on a much smaller server environment, but around 2003 and 2004 the number of users grew too large, leading the administration to shift hosting duties to Blackboard, added Hidalgo.

“(Blackboard data) is stored here on campus where we can monitor and protect it,” said Shariq Ahmed, a Blackboard administrator. “Also, we are bringing up a mirror of the system in San Francisco for disaster recovery.”

Blackboard, accessed through the portal on Fullerton.edu was previously hosted by Blackboard servers based in Virginia, said Hidalgo.

That means all data (course materials, pictures, discussion board posts) was saved on the east coast. Also, to log into Blackboard through the portal, students or faculty would be accessing the servers in Virginia.

This caused many problems and delays for the Information Technology department at CSUF.

Upgrades to the system required correspondence between Virginia and CSUF weeks in advance. Server downtimes were on a schedule set by Blackboard, not the university. The IT department operated on a three-hour time difference from Blackboard support staff. The university also had to pay Blackboard for hosting space and any other services required to maintain access and data.

Now that CSUF hosts Blackboard through a cluster of seven servers on campus, the IT department can fix issues and install updates according to their schedule without depending on others, Ahmed said.

It has also resulted in significant cost savings for the campus, Ahmed added.

With five front-end servers that process the exchange of data between the computer accessing Blackboard and the server containing Blackboard’s data, and two database servers housing the data, the IT department has optimized their server configuration for the traffic CSUF demands.

“We can monitor and maintain the servers directly…also we can get good reporting of usage and statistics to see what features are being used and what clients need most,” said Ahmed. “In the past we didn’t have control or direct access.”

“We’ve finally gotten our first good batch of statistics,” added Matt Ahola, a Blackboard administrator.

However, the move in-house had a difficult ground breaking for CSUF students.

“Blackboard’s had some technical difficulties lately,” said Connor.

That was due to a lack of experience in hosting the volume of traffic CSUF draws to its Web site and through its Blackboard.

“We initially had issues with server configuration, and that caused the downtimes,” said Hidalgo. “But we believe we’ve since been able to resolve those issues and have decreased the service interruptions.”

Now that Blackboard is again hosted on CSUF’s campus, support staff is not just local but on demand.

“We have 24/7 support for students, faculty, and staff…the administrators and technicians are on call 24/7 if something goes wrong,” said Hidalgo.

Now on version 8, Blackboard offers a plethora of features. Features students and faculty have become accustomed to include: document posting, chat, virtual classroom, grades, online tests, online assignment submission, and group activities (such as “Groups” or “Discussion Board”).

More advanced features now offered include: TurnItIn, “wikis,” blogs, podcasting, iTunes U, appointment scheduler, iLinc (Web-based video conferencing) and MERLOT (multimedia educational resource learning and online teaching).

With such a large volume of features at their disposal, faculty may seem overwhelmed by the constantly advancing technologies offered through Blackboard. However, faculty can fully customize each Blackboard course according to their needs, Ahmed said.

“No two Blackboard courses are similar in our campus,” said Ahmed. “If you look at two courses, they will be totally different.”

This is because “they can completely change the menu,” added Ahmed. This means faculty have the potential to move or remove tabs, change their names and color, while posting pictures and/or videos granting each course the potential for a unique appearance.

“They can select what content to show and what to hide from students,” said Ahmed. “They can decide what items to show within the grade center and what building blocks and tools to show.”

For Solano, “I started out just using it for content and documents and I’ve slowly evolved to use it more,” she said.

Since 2001, Solano has used Blackboard for each course section she’s taught as her fundamental tool to communicate with her students, she said.

“I wish students used Blackboard more religiously for lack of a better word,” she added.

Although some faculty maintain their own sites to host course materials and other documents for students, “students aren’t looking for my Web site, they’re looking at Blackboard,” said Clanin.

Yet with all new technologies come great personal responsibilities for those who use it. With something as simple as email, some students think sending an email to a professor is good enough, which is not the case, said Belmas.

“The technology is wonderful and sometimes dangerous, part of the educational process is to be there,” she said.

Which has led her to be more reluctant with the information she posts on Blackboard for her in-classroom courses, “it’s a hard balance to strike,” she added.

With a pilot version of Blackboard 9 on the horizon for the IT department, both IT and the FDC have been busy developing new features and workshops.

For the FDC, the major complaint from faculty has been the tedium of clicking to upload documents, Rimmer said. “It gets to them.”

However, “Blackboard is our culture,” Rimmer said.

Blackboard Facts
Active faculty accounts as of
Fall 2001: 149
Fall 2002: 438
Fall 2009: 1369
Active student accounts as of Fall 2009: 33,421
Total course sections offered within Blackboard: 8,128
Course sections actively used as of Fall 2009: 3,457
Number of servers on campus dedicated to Blackboard 7