Blackboard to be turned off, Fall 2010 Blackboard is being replaced. The new course management system will be available as an option alongside Blackboard in the Spring, and as the only system by the Fall. Introductory brown bags will be announced in two weeks, with workshops available for faculty later on. Follow the link for more information. MORE: http://www.williams.edu/messages/show.php?id=11398 from Jonathan Morgan-Leamon, Ofc for Information Technology

The transition to the new system, called glow.williams.edu, is scheduled to take three semesters, from Fall 2009 through Fall 2010. Blackboard will no longer be available in Fall 2010. - In Fall 2009, a dozen or so faculty volunteered to be "alpha testers" of Glow. Blackboard is continuing to operate, and most faculty and courses will still be hosted on Blackboard. - In Spring 2010, Glow will be in "open beta": Any faculty who would like to use Glow and get a jump on the new system will be welcome to. Blackboard will continue to operate normally, and any faculty who choose can still host their courses on it. - In Fall 2010, Glow will be active. All courses will be hosted on Glow. No courses will be available on Blackboard, students will be unable to log in, and login by faculty will be by request only in order to retrieve past course information. - After Fall 2010, Blackboard will be turned off, but kept "on ice" for at least a year in order to ensure that no historical but still-needed course information is lost. Note that the new system will let users do everything they can currently do in Blackboard. For more information, see the Glow help documentation at http://oit.williams.edu/w/?u=docs/Glow Documentation . There's a section on getting started with Glow, as well as a section on transitioning from Blackboard. OIT will be hosting brown bag introductory sessions in late November and early December. The announcements for these sessions will be in Daily Messages in two weeks. More hands-on workshops will also be available in December and January. The reasons that we're replacing Blackboard are threefold: 1. Blackboard has become expensive and the budget cutbacks of the past year made the high-quality, free, open-source alternatives increasingly attractive. Now is an opportune time both to save money and to move to a better system. Since we first implemented the Blackboard system 6 years ago the annual cost has increased over 150%, with more increases anticipated. 2. The Blackboard corporation recently released a major new version of Blackboard. The new version has significant changes in the user interface, meaning that faculty and students would be forced to learn an essentially new system even if we had stayed with Blackboard. 3. The new system makes it easier for faculty to adapt the course management system to their own teaching styles. It's a more flexible teaching tool than Blackboard.