The Blackboard upgrade was structured between three committees: the Steering Committee, made up of leadership; Planning team, made up of directors and staff directly involved with the Blackboard system; and project team, made up of Instructional Technologists from the Academic Excellence Centers, Blackboard Application Administrator and Director from the Enterprise Application Services team in Information Technology Services, technology support specialists, learning systems administrator, programmer analyst, instructional designer, and course production specialist from the Office of eLearning and Innovation.
An important aspect of the project was the detailed project plan and a comprehensive communication plan. Because the upgrade incorporated significant revisions to the user interface, communicating and preparing the faculty for the changes was key in the success of the project.
To engage the faculty, we created 6 one minute video teasers (http://eli.tri-c.edu/Faculty/Blackboard) regarding the software changes. Because we could not logistically train 800 faculty members face-2-face, we created elaborate How To Guides (http://eli.tri-c.edu/Faculty/Blackboard/How-To) and interactive video tutorials, along with What’s New webinars for those that could not attend the live sessions.
We also could not train over 11,000 students individually so we created a resource page and video teasers announcing the upgrade (http://eli.tri-c.edu/Student/Blackboard), along with detailed How to Guides and interactive video tutorials (http://eli.tri-c.edu/Student/Blackboard/How-To). As the Project Manager I was a consultant liaison, and reviewed and tested the student How to Guides and interactive videos.
We introduced a soft rollout of Blackboard version 9.1 in the summer of 2011 while running parallel 8.0 and 9.1 systems, and in August 2011 we implemented the update College-wide. Another aspect of the upgrade was to archive old course content while making better use of our course content storage, and removed courses that proved problematic when copied from one semester to the next.