Category Archives: Here at Notre Dame

Bringing Blackboard Vista 8 into the Oracle 11g world..

Posted on December 2, 2011 | Leave a comment

Just a few notes, probably only of significance to myself, of the work involved when the technology around a software changes even as that software is being brought to an end of life…

Blackboard’s CE and Vista product is scheduled to be de-supported in January of 2013. Notre Dame will continue to run it as we come along side it with another system and move our Faculty and Students to it.

  • Meanwhile Oracle has de-supported (as of June 2010) its database software version Oracle 10g, on which many institutions have been running their Bb Vista databases.
  • Meanwhile Oracle has acquired Java and issued Update 29 of Java 6 (available for PCs Oct 10th and for Mac 10.6.8 and Mac 10.7.1 shortly thereafter) with which Bb Vista 8 doesn’t play well.
  • Meanwhile Oracle 11g is being deployed as a database cluster – RAC, that is, a feature some of this older software wouldn’t have dreamed of.

This just makes keeping the old girl running that much more of an effort.

This week here at Notre Dame we validated our Bb Vista 8 Dev environment to service pack 6 (SP6) on our Oracle 11g RAC database farm. Here were our tests:

Test Result
NDCustom copy content tool (uses siapi) perl, cron, DB link to Banner, permissions, UI display: all looks good
Created supersections with our NDcustom job (uses siapi) Same as above. Passed.
Took a quiz while stopping the database on one node (no failover). System Exception error. Session remained open. Saved answers were saved. When database ‘returned’ saves continued. Repeated logged messages as app tried to reconnect to the database. Passed
Took a quiz while gracefully failing over database nodes. No system exception error. Session remained open. Everything saved correctly. Only indication the db node had failed over was watching the netstat –a close connections on 1 db and open on another node, also saw 1 unpinned connection error in the logs. RAC works!
JMS real-time messaging server failover Still fails. Same behavior as always. Recommend Weblogic setting to leave Target set to a single non-migratable node.
Background Jobs: Garbage Collection. Deleted hundreds of courses. Checked timing & completion. No essential change in performance. GC completes & took over an hour. Our live system job  averages 2 hrs nightly on 10g to complete. We now anticipate the same on 11g.
Background Jobs: Content Index Search No essential change between 10g and 11g. Works. Passes.
Background Jobs: Tracking Event No essential change between 10g and 11g. Works. Passes.

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Posted in Course Management Server-side, Here at Notre Dame, KnowledgeBaseVista4, LMS

Notre Dame’s current FTEs and skill set supporting our CMS/LMS

Posted on November 15, 2010 | 1 Comment

 

The University of Notre Dame has some unique characteristics, but these are not necessarily advantageous towards fully utilizing the best of teaching and learning technologies, including the LMS.

The major factors your institution must consider when benchmarking your course management staffing:

  • Does your institution have a School of Education? If you do, they will tend to keep the educational use of technology ‘fresh’ on your campus. Or perhaps I should say, they could do that, if you’re intentional about allowing them to.
  • Does your institution have a distance education program? Are you thinking of starting or expanding one? Instructional Designers will be a part of your campus already.
  • Does your institution require (“Can” your institution require?)  the posting of grades and/or syllabus for all courses in your LMS? Many of your faculty will need help complying. Instructional Designers will help grow their own business.
  • Do you have, or do you intend to grow, multiple integration points into and out of your LMS? Not just SIS provisioning and SSO to digital library resources, but other tools such as iTunes U, the next generation of Wimba/Elluminate tools and so forth.

Notre Dame’s current LMS Staffing

 

Hours/Week
System Admin

2
DBA

2
App Admin (regression testing, patches, certs, provisioning, monitoring)

4
OIT Help Desk

5
MCOB Help Desk

4
Kaneb Cntr

4
Language Cntr (Wimba)

2
Library eReserves

.5
Second Level Support (FAQ’s, blogs, communication)

16
Academic Technologies (iTunesU, Streaming media)

2
TOTALS

41.5

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Posted in Course Management, Here at Notre Dame, lms evaluation, Teaching and Learning

How my work might change: does open source require more FTEs to support?

Posted on November 10, 2010 | 5 Comments

(How my work might change if Notre Dame chose Sakai as its next LMS)

No. No. And no. These are the repeated answers echoing from those who’ve switched from a proprietary LMS (or whatever three letter acronym we choose) to an open source LMS. (And pipe up here if you’re one of them. Tell us your story. Tell us why?).

Then come the caveats. These are worth exploring. Especially in my shoes.

  1. With open source, you can choose how much change you’re willing to invest in.
  2. With open source, you can choose how much ‘give-back’ to the community your institution is tuned for.

About #1. Institutions find it an attractive proposition that open source would enable them to enhance functionality and/or fix bugs on their own schedule and frequency, thus making them more responsive to the Academy’s needs than they were when using a proprietary system.  Can Notre Dame afford to be more responsive to the Academy than we had the option of being with a proprietary LMS?

Now you have options. You can still eat the same cooking everyone else eats. Or, you can cook your own. Cooking your own will take more developer resources. Maybe your Academy wishes the Gradebook you gave them did this ‘n such that-a-way instead? Maybe central IT can tell them they’d be happy to install their departmental version of the Gradebook if they will build it themselves? (You very shortly would be able to tell them that while still using a proprietary LMS, given the adoption of the Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard, but I digress…).

I think Notre Dame at this juncture in time would choose to provide the same level of support and maintenance as previously, and that means that we can bite off maybe adding one to two tool integrations a year. At least initially, we would not necessarily be any more responsive to our Academy’s growing needs.

About #2.

If you choose to cook your own, well then, you might as well make that flavor of the widget available to the entire extended community as well. More home cooked meals = more FTEs. Period. Your choice.

For my part, logic compels me to want an open source solution only if it comes with FTE’s to start Notre Dame’s own CookBook.

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Posted in Course Management, Current Affairs, Here at Notre Dame