I think I did that right?
Back in June we took a few weeks and integrated Blackboard Collaborate (our web conferencing tool) with our instance of the Learning Environment (Brightspace just doesn’t feel right). We are currently running 10.2 SP9 of the LE.
Reflections? Well, for such a simple integration (and really the D2L interface is waaaaay better than the Blackboard Collaborate interface) it took a hell of a long time. We had to purchase and get D2L to install the IPSCT pack – so if you’re entering into an agreement with D2L and may way to do this later, definitely spend the cash up front. From start to unveil it was over six weeks – now that’s not solid work on just this. After D2L installed the IPSCT pack, we had to contact Blackboard support to get our credentials. Seeing as we’ve had total turnover in who supports Blackboard Collaborate, our new Collaborate support person was not on the list of approved contacts – which is funny because she’s the one who does all the tickets. So we contact our account manager. No response. It turns out that well, they are no longer our account manager, that’s why we haven’t heard from them in over 9 months. Great. So support can’t do anything, neither can our phantom account manager. Finally we get to the bottom of who our new Blackboard account manager is, they straighten out the mess and our person is now an approved contact. After that it still takes a week to get our credentials for test and prod.
Configuration on test went smoothly enough – if you’ve ever worked with External Learning Tools in the LE, it’s the same as any other configuation in that tool – have the address to make the connection, secret key and password, check a few more boxes, and then off you go. Now everyone who gets enrolled in the LE gets a Default Role at the org level, and then gets assigned a more applicable role at the course offering level, which means for us, you have to go through not only the Instructor/Student and TA roles, but the Default Role as well. While this is a pain to do, it’s often easy to forget to do it – and that’s what we promptly did. A day or two was spent tearing what’s left of my hair out, until the lightning struck and it sparked the engine enough to get it firing again.
Fast forward a couple of weeks and we get some time to implement it on prod, we yet again forget what we did to make it work. A week later we said something to the effect of “Fudge, Default Role…” ran off to the LE and fixed our error. Sometimes it’s not the technology that fails you…
We’ve been using the Collaborate/Online Rooms integration with D2L for a few years but I’m really tempted to switch over to the BLTI Collaborate integration because it saves the recordings as Kaltura videos rather than klunky Java files. The downside, thus far, is that it doesn’t work with mobile devices yet. I believe this is because the link to the meeting has org-unit info in the URL, which confuses the BB Collaborate App.
Andy – thanks. I didn’t even know about the BLTI version – perhaps with Blackboard going away from the Java framework (now working with native web standards) the issue(s) with mobile will be less important. I don’t know how long we’ll stay with Collaborate, as our contract is up in 2015 and we’ll look at all the options this year and make an informed decision.