The answer to the BLE's prayers

This session is by far the best one I've been to - not because it was showcasing exemplary practice with Bb or stunning the audience with bells and whistles, but because it offered some real - and very relevant solutions to current difficulties the BLE tech team are facing with running Snapshot locally and with a controller. I hope I can convey everything here - but I have spoken to the presenter and she will a) send her explanatory slides and b) be happy to talk more.

Basically the College (Prince George's Community College) has paid for some bespoke building blocks and installed some FREE building blocks to fix the issue of wanting to run updates on the fly without using Snapshot (they are also hosted and use a controller) without mucking up DSKs and having changes overwritten with the next Snapshot run. Other solutions found were to assist with support issues.

Notes:

The challenge – managing growing Bb demands with no new resources; the strategy was to automate as much as possible.

Snapshot Problems:

1) Getting multiple requests to merge courses. Staff are spending time managing the process in creating files and updating snapshot to rename enrolments to move students.

Solution – merge course enrolment building block - custom built for institution. Staff able to do this themselves – only merging with same DSK and only their own courses. No Snapshot required!

2) Managing DSKs on Linux box with limited knowledge of linux commands; GUI interface preferred.

Solution – building block SmartDSM (FREE!). DSKs can be managed through the GUI; disabling, purging, counting, creating and modifying. The presenter has kept the war files as the building block is no longer available on the web, and will send them to anyone wanting them.

3) Managing Snapshot exceptions – e.g. when info from student records not correct, exception files need to be run manually from commandline – high potential for errors if wrong command run.

Solutions:

a) Manager User in Course building block (FREE) – modifying student enrolment on the fly from GUI. Also poss to change DSK.

b) data manager tool building block - More control over snapshot exceptions. Allows you to manipulate all user course and membership values

User Support issues:

Routine things that are done over and over again – collection of self-service tools for users and admins to be bale to manage things more easily

1) managing user enrol requests

Solution: Enrol non-student user building block

2) managing failed login-requests – providing students info to let them work out why they cant get in – not reading notices.

Solution – user look-up building block – on login page, checks LDAP account, Bb account and tells the user what the problem is.

3) Managing system user activity – hit or miss when determining ad hoc downtimes

Solution - Seneca’s online building block (FREE) – allows you to see who’s logged in the last minute up to 3 hours ago

4) Providing real-time support to users

Solutions – Meebo chat widget (FREE) - embedded on portal page and within Bb

AND Wimba Pronto (FREE) – authenticates against Bb and populates from Bb course/orgs list

5) Determining Active courses – hard to determine with hosted platform. Wanted something on the GUI to provide a report

Solution: course activity report building block – lists in excel content numbers, DB hits, announcement hits – not Learning Objects tools, but something she’d like to move on. Project Astra can identify these tools – in beta.

Lessons learned:

-Empowering users by introducing self-service tools

-free tools v useful to get started

-customised tools are much better

-letting tech team have more time to do other things.