WEST LAFAYETTE, IN – In a report issued today from Gerry McCartney, Purdue’s Vice President for Information Technology & CIO, Blackboard was out of commission for nearly 28 hours during the fall 2008 semester at the West Lafayette campus.
Blackboard is an online system allowing instructors to distribute course materials, communicate with students, post grades and administer online quizzes, among other things. However, when the website is down, these materials are inaccessible, leaving many students and instructors frustrated with the loss of productivity.
Ben Holmes, a Purdue IT support specialist who works with Blackboard, wrote in an e-mail in mid-November that the system “has been less reliable lately than we would wish. We are in direct contact with the company [Blackboard Inc.] by phone in an effort to prevent future problems.”
McCartney's report on Blackboard outages total nearly 28 hours of lost productivity during the fall 2008 semester (click to enlarge)
The source of these problems is the sheer number of students trying to access the site. Purdue, with over 50,000 students and instructors across four campuses, is the largest client of Blackboard. McCartney explains that “as is the case with much system-level software, scale is an important determinant of stability.”
What is being done to address the problem? McCartney has spoken frankly with the CEO of Blackboard, Inc. about the university’s need for a reliable service. “Our issues are not yet resolved but we expect Blackboard to be fully engaged in the resolution of issues as they continue to emerge,” he said in an e-mail.
McCartney has an annual salary of $264,000.
COMMENTARY: McCartney, since his hire in 2006 has pressed too hard for the implementation of a fully integrated system across the four campuses. I do not understand his desire for everyone to be on the same system. There are many unique challenges faced by a computer system when 50,000 people try to gain access, and Blackboard is not capable of delivering the reliability we need, as evidenced by this most recent outage report.
I do not believe that uniformity should be placed before reliability. If Blackboard continues to have reliability issues (and McCartney has given no reason to believe this will change any time soon), the IT department at Purdue (ITaP) should not push instructors away from the smaller systems they’re used to. This pressure to get all courses onto Blackboard seems to be coming through the dislocation of resources which helped instructors learn other available course management systems such as YACS, a system used by several departments at Purdue including agriculture, pharmacy, nursing and health sciences, which has no reliability issues that I am aware of. I am a strong opponent of the integration of systems when the chosen system to use does not have the resources to adequately meet our needs.
The full Fall 2008 Vista Outage Report can be found here in PDF format. For the report formatted in Microsoft Excel, please e-mail me.
Tommy,
You are such a bitter blogger
. Haha. Well anyway Blackboard is exactly why the school of management decided to set up its own system. Long live Katalyst.
Steve
Purdue, while big, isn’t the biggest client. The University System of Georgia has 268,000 students. I’d be willing to bet the Connecticut State University System and Utah State Systems both rival us.
That said, it is well known the Blackboard Vista among clients the product has performance issues given enough workload. The most important tools like the grade book have the worst problems.
The problem with departmentally run systems, is they often are run by IT people as an afterthought and part of many different job responsibilities. So things like backups, upgrades, and security get neglected. These are the things students and the faculty don’t care about until there is a problem and everything is lost.
Purdue ITaP is absolutely pathetic. You said it correctly that they put uniformity ahead of reliability…they have created a system that uniformly sucks.
Let me count the ways that ITaP has personally made my life miserable…just for starters the Pal2.0 network has very limited coverage on campus. My laptop is constantly being dropped from the network because of low signal. I have lost so many frickin’ changes to files I am editing that it makes me want to weep.
They also seem completely clueless about how to fix problems; if and when you can finally get a real person on the phone who is *supposed* to know how to fix a particular problem (for instance, accessing a server that used to be accessible, but suddenly isn’t anymore), they tell you it can’t be fixed. Then, if you are like me and have half a clue as to how the problem can be fixed, you walk them through it over the phone, and lo and behold it turns out the problem *can* be fixed. By someone who has half a clue, anyway.
The most recent problem came when I tried online to get a MySQL account. Try to do it sometime, just for fun. Then try to get someone at ITaP to explain why their system cannot setup a MySQL account for you (or anyone else). The answer? (when you finally get to talk to someone who is supposed to be responsible for it)…they don’t know why it doesn’t work. Sorry.
Apparently there are 500 (!) people working for ITaP. Who are these people…high school dropouts? I could train a chimp to do better IT management than them.