May Communication - Email to Existing Blackboard Faculty

From: Blackboard Administrator
Sent: Wednesday, May 15, 2007 1:27 PM
Subject: Blackboard is becoming myTulane!

IMPORTANT: This message is an update on the use of Blackboard for your Fall 07 courses and the improvements we are providing with this upgrade that will impact how your course is created. You may continue to read the message in its entirety here, or you may follow this link to read it in your web browser http://ts.tulane.edu/teaching_and_learning/current_projects/myTulane/Bb_faculty.cfm.

You may have seen a notice that the university is embarking on a very exciting migration from our Blackboard Learning System to a more full-featured Academic Suite that we're calling myTulane. MyTulane includes a content management system, a community system and, of course,  the well-known learning system.

What does this mean for the university?
The migration from a locally-managed install of the Blackboard Learning System to a vendor-operated and managed install offers a variety of additional software features at a remote location. The remote location supports the university's disaster recovery plan by maximizing availability at critical times.

What does this mean to you as a Tulane affiliate?
All Tulane affiliates will have access to myTulane. The system will provide role-based information regarding academic and community-based events, notices and other items of interest. Your courses will be displayed as they have been on the previous system, but you'll also have access to various Tulane-related e-commerce services, e-portfolio capabilities and a content system that provides individual repositories for document uploads and storage.

What does this mean to you as faculty?
Faculty will realize two benefits of the new myTulane system, aside from the additional course-related features.
1)    Your courses will be created and assigned to you automatically.
You will no longer have to request your courses each semester. Course assignments will be fed into the myTulane system so that your courses will appear as they are assigned to you by your department.

2)    You will have access to the content system.
You will have the ability to upload single copies of course documents and point to those documents from one or multiple course sites. This will eliminate multiple copies of entire courses from semester to semester. You will simply upload your course documents to your personal content repository and link to the documents from your course sites. Updating the document in one place will automatically update that document in all places, making the use of the system much more efficient.

In order to take advantage of the content system benefits, we will be unable to automatically move existing Blackboard courses to the new system install. We will provide instructions on how to download your desired course content for upload into the new system, but no content will be automatically transferred.

Timeline and the next steps
The migration to myTulane will take place this Fall. We are currently developing "how-to" documents as guidelines to assist you with downloading content from the existing system and uploading it to the new content system for course delivery. We'd like to make sure that we address all of your needs, so please complete the short survey at http://ts.tulane.edu/teaching_and_learning/current_projects/comments/  so that we may attempt to address your concerns throughout the migration process.