News

Blackboard will get beached by 2010

The platform that powers Cal State Long Beach’s online course and organization management system, BeachBoard, will soon change to improve functionality.

Blackboard Academic Suite, which currently operates BeachBoard, will be phased out over the summer and eventually replaced by spring 2010 by a learning management suite from ANGEL Learning Inc.

This summer, a few classes will act as “pilot courses” in testing the new platform, according to Don Gardner, associate vice president for academic technology. According to the CSULB website, converted courses will include UNIV 100, PSY 301 and PSY 354.

“Not all summer courses using BeachBoard will be affected,” Gardner said. “Some people may be aware, many people will not know the difference because BeachBoard will remain.”

There will be a “massive conversion effort in the fall” before BeachBoard runs entirely through ANGEL in January 2010, Gardner said. At that time, the service’s URL will change to a site supported by ANGEL. However, it will be called BeachBoard 2.0, according to the CSULB website.

“There aren’t very many [differences], actually,” said Leslie Kennedy, director of Instructional Technology Support Services.

The decision to make changes to BeachBoard was made last year after Blackboard became too problematic. The contract with Blackboard is coming close to expiring, according to the CSULB website.

“A year ago the difficulties were really severe,” Gardner said. “BeachBoard was going down every night for at least an hour or so.”

Gardner said some students and faculty had also lost documents and files that they had uploaded to the system.

When CSULB first implemented Blackboard, the contract “was in excess of $300,000” per year and has reached almost $400,000 for this year, according to Gardner.

According to Gardner, the price is due to several factors, including licensing fees, support costs and hosting the website, since it is located at the blackboard.com domain rather than csulb.edu.

ANGEL will cost the same amount but will offer “more functionality,” Gardner said.

No features will be lost, but some will be added. Gardner said ANGEL’s platform has a more “user-friendly user interface.”

According to Kennedy, some features that will be new to BeachBoard include wiki, portfolio and blog capabilities, as well as mobile access to BeachBoard, which would format the site for convenience for electronics such as cell phones, iPhones and the iPod Touch. ANGEL will also be able to customize updates, tracking what happens in between each student’s logins, Kennedy said.

According to the CSULB website, BeachBoard will also allow podcasting and Google access.

Before choosing ANGEL, the University had to first consider the California State University system’s Accessible Technology Initiative (ATI), whose priority is to make sure technology is easily accessible to those with disabilities, according to the CSU website.

In selecting the new platform, approximately 50 CSULB students, administration and faculty volunteered last year to be a part of a task force researching the alternatives that meet the ATI, Gardner said.

The two options were ANGEL and Moodle, a free open-source management system, which were rated based on the force’s 114 criteria, Gardner said. According to Kennedy, they considered flexibility in program tools, interface customization and access to more statistical information.

After completion of the research, the task force recommended ANGEL to the provost, who approved it.

Gardner said BeachBoard has been used at CSULB for at least three years. Kennedy said BeachBoard was started in the late 1990s, before she came to CSULB, because online course management was something “pretty much every university was doing.”

Approximately 9,000 class sections use BeachBoard “in some way or another” per semester, according to Gardner. Kennedy said that about 94 percent of CSULB students had at least one class available on BeachBoard last semester.

Other CSU campuses that use Blackboard include East Bay, Stanislaus, Fullerton and Fresno. CSULB is the first CSU to use ANGEL, but Gardner said some are considering the suite as an option.

“Other schools at CSU, even around the country … had similar problems [with Blackboard],” Gardner said. “There are some schools at CSU that are happy with Blackboard.”

ANGEL is currently being used at schools such as Penn State University, Michigan State University and some State University of New York campuses, according to the CSULB website.

Gardner said the change will be an improvement to BeachBoard but acknowledged that ANGEL is not perfect.

“There will be some problems,” he said. “There usually are.”

According to Gardner, both online and on-campus training sessions, workshops and appointments will offer students and faculty an easier transition to ANGEL.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published.

Daily 49er newsletter

Instagram