Blackboard has announced the following, regarding their Blackboard Collaborate web conferencing product.
Contingency plan to temporarily disable specific Blackboard Collaborate features to sustain unprecedented global adoption
As
the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) global pandemic continues to unfold, many
institutions around the world are leveraging Blackboard Collaborate to support
blended and fully online instruction. We are grateful that our virtual
classroom capability is helping the broader educational community maintain
continuity of instruction during this challenging time for instructors and
students.
We have been carefully monitoring Collaborate as
more schools and organizations increase their use, and we have already taken specific
measures to optimize its reliability. In the coming weeks, we are
projecting an unprecedented increase in the use of Collaborate in different
regions around the world. Out of an abundance of caution, and in order to
maintain the highest continuity of service possible, we have made the decision
to disable specific features that can impact overall system stability. These
features are:
• Timer (a
countdown timer that helps with classroom time management)
• Chat
typing indicator (a visual indicator that someone is typing but have not yet
completed their thought. The chat feature itself will still be
available.)
• Netstats
indicator (a visual indicator of connection quality next to each
user)
• Reducing
the number of video thumbnails from 4 to 2 (this is the maximum number of
thumbnails visible in the grid view)
We believe that the removal of these features
will not significantly impact the overall Collaborate user experience, which
will still include video, screen sharing, chat, a virtual whiteboard, and other
favorite features. We believe that disabling them is in the best interest of
our global client community. Consistent, reliable service is our top priority.
We expect to reinstate these features once we have more information about how
the system is performing and we continue to make improvements.
In addition to disabling the features above, we
will be temporarily disabling or reducing the following administrator-level
functionality in Collaborate.
• Recording
transcoding (this includes generating several renditions of a recording file,
which is not necessary for the playback of a Collaborate recording).
As we continue to monitor the performance of
Collaborate in the coming weeks, and in the interest of prioritizing system
stability over all else, we may take similar actions for other capabilities. If
this situation arises, we will notify our clients in a similar manner to this
message.
OIS would like to remind everyone that we also have the
Cisco Webex communication and collaboration tools available to you.
If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please contact the Campus
Support Center at 479-968-0646 or campussupport@atu.edu