Some Loyola students scrambling to finish finals that their professors posted on Blackboard at the end of the Fall 2006 semester met an unexpected and unwelcome roadblock. After logging on to Blackboard, their frantic pace came to a halt, and Internet speeds slowed to a crawl by the overloaded server.
“We received two complaints regarding the performance of the system during exams,” said Bret Jacobs, executive director of Information Technology. “We immediately contacted Blackboard’s customer service center and they isolated and resolved the immediate issue.”
Elias Khalaf, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science, filed one such complaint on behalf of his computer impact class.
“On the first day of testing the students came to class to take the test in the lab, logged on and then proceeded to take the online test. As soon as the test password was supplied, Blackboard became very irresponsive,” said Khalaf. “Eventually, everyone started taking the test, but after only a few minutes the system started to drag. It was acting very slowly, and some of the questions were taking five minutes or even more to accept the student’s supplied answer and move on to the next question.
“It was really very frustrating for the students and embarrassing for me. As soon as I noticed that things were not working as planned, I brought this problem to the attention of the help desk at IT, and they started investigating the problem immediately.”
Jacobs said that Blackboard technicians have made several “tuning enhancements” since the incident to reduce future problems and that they will continue to supervise the system.
After Hurricane Katrina, Loyola paid to move its Blackboard hosting to Washington, D.C. The move primarily guarantees that access to Blackboard will not be interrupted during an evacuation or loss of utility services to the main campus.
During Katrina, the Loyola-based Blackboard services were not restored until 10 days after the storm. The shift to Blackboard hosting in Washington, D.C., will eliminate recovery delay and ensure continuity in instruction for our students, Jacobs said.
While professors and students will be able to continue courses in case ofanother hurricane, problems during regular semesters are leaving them fed-up.
“The idea (of professional off-campus hosting) was to provide continuity in case we had to evacuate for hurricanes,” Khalaf said. “However, having the servers so remote and not under Loyola’s direct control means that problems take longer to resolve. In addition, there is inherent latency and possible failure in communicating back and forth with the servers.
“At this point I do not plan to have online exams on Blackboard,” Khalaf said. “I had two bad experiences out of three, and this is not a good percentage.”
Since Loyola no longer directly manages Blackboard, Jacobs encourages faculty and students to use the 24-hour support line in case of difficulties.
Kelly Roth can be reached at [email protected].
