Ohio University is preparing to move on from an obsolete and increasingly cluttered version of Blackboard by summer 2009.

Blackboard 7.3, currently in its pilot year at OU, offers many new ways of communication between students and their teachers, such as wikis, blogs, podcasts and other multi-media, said Sean O’Malley, Information Technology communications manager. The new version would also be more stable and reliable than Blackboard 6, O’Malley added.

Blackboard 6 is getting “big and unwieldy,” O’Malley said. The university has been using it for many years and has lots of material from previous classes stored on it. This consumes more disk space and slows the response time.

Blackboard 6 costs $249,300 for licensing, maintenance and hosting for up to 8,000 users, with an additional $32,500 for every additional 8,000 users. There were 27,136 students and instructors using Blackboard in 2007. The price will remain the same with the new version, which is to go campuswide by summer 2009.

Blackboard outages have been appearing more frequently, but it is not all because of problems with Blackboard itself, O’Malley said. IT has been installing software upgrades and fixing glitches on OAK identification, which makes it impossible to log into anything requiring OAK ID, including Blackboard.

“We’re doing our best to keep it up until we switch over,” O’Malley said.

87 courses with approximately 3,400 students are currently piloting the new Blackboard.

Michael Martel, a professor in the College of Business, is one of the teachers who piloted Blackboard 7.3. He said that the multimedia features have helped stimulate conversation. The new version also allows teachers to specify due dates for homework and has a better layout.

“Things are in a more logical place,” he said.

It is not perfect, however.

The biggest flaw is the browser compatibility, Martel said. To submit homework on Blackboard 7.3, students must use Internet Explorer, a browser that has widely fallen out of popularity, Martel said.

Blackboard 7.3 is not the latest version available. Blackboard 8.0 is “radically different” from either the current version or version 7.3 in terms of layout, O’Malley said. It would require faculty to relearn how to use Blackboard, which is not a problem with 7.3.

The current plan is to fully transition to Blackboard 7.3 by  the summer of 2009, with piloting for Blackboard 8.0 to start the following fall.

The university does not have an exclusive contract with Blackboard, and faculty experiment with open-source programs. The decision of whether or not to use a free program is up to individual faculty members.

lb175806@ohiou.edu