Blackboard Upgrade To SAAS
TECHNOLOGY SUPPORT | CURRENT INITIATIVE

Blackboard (Bb) Learn is a university mission critical system and an integral part of most UTEP courses. Almost 1,300 instructors (data pulled from Eesysoft) used Bb Learn to teach their spring 2018 course(s). Any Bb Learn system outage negatively affects student performance in a course. The negative impact on student success is even higher for 100% online courses. Therefore, the availability of Bb Learn is of outmost importance for the university. As our infrastructure currently exists, Bb Learn must be taken offline regularly in order to perform system maintenance and upgrades.

Our goal is to prevent any downtime for this mission critical system by transitioning to Bb Learn SaaS Infrastructure. Moving to this infrastructure will result in maximized up-time for Bb Learn. Software updates in Bb Learn SaaS are seamless and offers intuitions the option to make new Bb Learn features available as soon as they are released. Additionally, there are user experience’s related improvements with the move to the SaaS infrastructure. The global navigation for instructors and students has been improved. Switching between different computing devices to include mobile is easier with Bb Learn SaaS due to its responsive design. Moving to SaaS gives instructors the choice to continue their Bb course(s) in the new ultra or traditional view.