Blackboard Outage?

funktastic

Is there a scheduled Blackboard outage at the moment?

It ain't working for me and I need to study :eek:

funktastic

Ah it's back. I can relax and realise that I'm stupid

Red Alert

I think though the fragility of the blackboard system is quite scary around exam time. The college are paying a crazy amount of money for software that needs huge resources to work, when they could use other systems like Moodle with much better reliability and uptime.

gubbie

Red Alert wrote:

I think though the fragility of the blackboard system is quite scary around exam time. The college are paying a crazy amount of money for software that needs huge resources to work, when they could use other systems like Moodle with much better reliability and uptime.

You should tell them that. And if not them then... well I'm not gonna name names but "your-man" I think that'll work

EDIT to say:
I just remembered, the computers in the engineering building keep crashing-they crashed on me during my maths practical exam. Is this just engineering or is it happening anywhere else? Whats odd is it seems to be happening to all of them. Oddly enough, in the one time of year we don't need them as much as we did. Or really at all

delta_bravo

Red Alert wrote:

I think though the fragility of the blackboard system is quite scary around exam time. The college are paying a crazy amount of money for software that needs huge resources to work, when they could use other systems like Moodle with much better reliability and uptime.

Moodle isnt very reliable. Our Human Geography 1 module was based solely upon moodle and tutorials. However, on the last day of assignment submissions the whole thing collapsed due to high traffic ( about 250 users online ) and didnt recover for a few hours.

singingstranger

delta_bravo wrote:

Moodle isnt very reliable. Our Human Geography 1 module was based solely upon moodle and tutorials. However, on the last day of assignment submissions the whole thing collapsed due to high traffic ( about 250 users online ) and didnt recover for a few hours.

Red Alert wrote:

they could use other systems like Moodle with much better reliability and uptime.

Surely if Moodle is open source, *someone* clever out there could sort that out? Or am I just being naive? I remember Moodle being mentioned as a more viable alternative during the Sabbat elections but not much else...

Jonny Arson

I used moodle for one of my modules and I personally didn't find it as user friendly or as easy to navigate as Blackboard. If the college can get any reliability issues with Blackboards sorted then I see no reason to switch to moodle or anything else

Red Alert

That to be honest is more a symptom of an underpowered server than a software issue.

Blackboard's problems are a lot more endemic, right down to how it's built. For example, why have the Upload File, then Send File thing, or the very non-intuitive sections like Staff Information etc which most lecturer's don't use.

Thanks be to god i'm no longer taking any classes!

Aquitaine

It was a scheduled outage - saw it on the messages in connect