Simon
We are (as I mentioned in an earlier post) in the process of building a
database to track the changes and archiving activities on our blackboard
system - this may seem an additional administrative burden but I think
will prove worthwhile in the long run. We are also using this to maintain
general Bb client information and training records and it may be expanded
on to track other online learning activities. It will then provide us
with the ability to list active courses, group by instructor, group by
course, etc... - and in light of what you have said I will see if there
is some way we can also include tracking and listing of disk usage?
The problem results from Bb not offering any way to usefully monitor
details of courses or instructors. Not to mention tracking previous
'owners' (which is what we are trying to do).
Another issue relating to monitoring is that BlackBoard sites can easily
be made publicly accessible! This area is very grey but I think there are
potential copyright and other publishing issues at stake (including
defamation, libel and slander) so I think we need to be able to
demonstrate some sort of monitoring of who is responsible for anything
that might be published.
Does anyone know if there is guidance from JISC (or similar) regarding
staff web pages as this is a similar situation - should we be getting
staff to sign something? - maybe we are covered by existing network and
email regulations?
ben
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Simon Housego wrote:
> Hi to all,
>
> We're running Bb 5.5 on Solaris and we are beginning to run into
> housekeeping limitations within Blackboard and I'm seeking some
> advice on how other institutions grapple with some of the problems we
> experience in managing our rapidly growing Bb databases.
>
> 1. We have hundreds of courses in Blackboard but we have no easy way
> of determing which ones are active, and how active they are. I would
> like to be able to run a report (online or in batch I don't mind)
> that reported across a selection of subjects (one, some, many, all)
> some of the data that is available in Course Statistics, such as
> number of hits between choosen dates, and to produce the report in a
> form that could be loaded up into Excel for some further
> manipulation. (I don't want pie charts, just numbers)
>
> Does anyone know how this can be done, or even if it can be done?
>
> 2. Some of our courses consume enormous amounts of disk space. Our
> top 15 courses in space allocation terms total some 10.5Gb. (Hard to
> believe, but true.) We want better ways of tracking this useage and
> to map it over time so we know where to focus our efforts when trying
> to manage the backoffice aspects of Bb.
>
> Is anyone else running into these issues, and how is your institution
> dealing with these issues?
>
> --
> Simon Housego
>
> Lecturer,
> Institute for Interactive Media & Learning
> University of Technology, Sydney
> Ph 61-2-9514-1661
> Fx 61-2-9514-1666
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