Center for Information Technology Services

Blackboard Steering Committee
Minutes for 11/08/2001

Attendees: Brent Nickles, Brook Botvin, Sarita Sanjoy, Marian Jackson, Tom Connolly, Jeff Hawk, Harry Debusk, Kent Buckingham, and Barbara Zirkin

Blackboard Agenda

• Integration of Blackboard and Banner:  Kent
- Pat and Melinda want to hold a meeting with our group and the SIMS team to discuss what needs to be done to move from a level 2 to level 3.   Kent  has extended this meeting to members of the BBSteering Committee.

• Campus Backup Scheme for Blackboard:  Brent
- Blackboard runs on 2 servers, an application server, and a database server.  Each server has a full backup on Sunday.  Monday – Saturday are incremental backups.  In addition, a warm backup is performed daily on the database itself (Oracle).  
Instructors have the ability to ‘export’ courses that they own at any time.  I will follow up with Blackboard to see if this is good practice to further ensure the safety of blackboard data.
Two additional questions were raised:  Do the instructors have the ability to “import”, and if this is good practice to ‘export’, can we batch export every course.
 
• Webmail/Mailspinner:  Kent
- We are still waiting on Blackboard to determine if this is an option.

• Horizon Live
- I’ll talk to the vendor to get pricing and possibly a demo version of the product.

Questions to/from the users:

1. Discussion Groups - Brent
I have added school discussion groups to the community tab. 
Harry also would like time availability of discussion groups.  I’ll forward this off to suggestions@blackboard.com 

2. Virtual Classroom – Sarita
Sarita is having problems using powerpoint when it is directly on her workstation.  She can only get it to work when she puts in a URL.