Background

BACKGROUND

Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana is a Catholic, residential women’s college in the liberal arts tradition.  In 2015, we launched 3 new graduate programs welcoming both men and women students from around the world.

Founded by the Sisters of the Holy Cross, the student population is over 1,500 students with a faculty of 185.  Saint Mary’s has licensed Blackboard as its learning management system since 2006. 

Starting in the fall semester of 2009, every course offered at Saint Mary's automatically has a Blackboard course shell created.  Each course ID includes a code for the semester.  The semester code includes the academic year and semester.  An example, for academic year 2010 the codes were:

201010 - Fall 2009 courses

201020 – Spring 2010 courses

201030 – Summer 2010 courses

Instructors have the option to use the courses listed in Blackboard or not.  All courses are set to unavailable.  Each instructor controls the availability of the courses to their students.  Reminders of how to set a course availability are emailed to instructors each semester. We include several more reminders in a document we share called the 20 Points to Blackboard.

Campus Blackboard Resources

SERVERS - Saint Mary’s has maintained its own servers for Blackboard including a production server, and pre-prod and development virtual servers.  The production server has been replaced once and will go off its 5-year license in 2017.  

BLACKBOARD PERSONNEL - There are no “Blackboard dedicated” personnel at Saint Mary’s College. 
- The Director of Instructional Technology along with her other duties serves as GUI administrator, instructional designer, trainer, and Tier II student support.
- The Director of Systems and Network serves as the backend server administrator
- The Director of Administrative Computing serves as our DBA and has always setup our Blackboard servers. 

With the advancements in cloud services and Blackboard's deployment of the Plus and Advantage SaaS offerings, we began to investigate the possibilities of Saint Mary’s moving to the Plus solution.  Our Blackboard sales representative, Ben Younce, has proven to be a great asset.  He invested the time to meet with us and gain a better understanding of our needs.  Ben along with Shawn Boom, Vice President for North America Higher Education worked with our CIO to come to an agreement on the SaaS deployment.  I was pleased and impressed with Blackboard’s willingness to work with us in a plan that fit our needs and our limited resources.

Doing My Homework

I found it important to spend time researching, planning, and asking questions about moving to SaaS.  I took advantage of attending sessions about SaaS at Blackboard's annual US conference, regional meetings, and webinars to learn as much as I could about the plans for SaaS. Taking time to attend those sessions provided the necessary foundation and information for our College to think about moving to one of the SaaS options.