Phases

Deployment Phase

During the deployment phase the development, test, and production systems were commissioned, and software was installed. In addition, all changes needed for the integration have been made, including the development of the SIS integration (roster management, enrollments, course creation, etc.), and Shibboleth authentication.

In the deployment phase the training plan, communication plan, and pilot plan were also developed.

Pilot faculty were identified and trained prior to the beginning of the pilot phase.

Pilot Phase

Beginning in August 2012 a select group of faculty received access to the pilot system to develop their classes, which are being taught during the Fall 2012 semester. During the pilot program the selected faculty are supported by the Training Lead of the project, along with members of the LMS Steering Committee.

Migration Phase

The migration phase overlaps the pilot phase, since it began in October of 2012. During the migration phase faculty migrated their course content from the legacy Blackboard 8 to Blackboard Learn, or requested a new blank site. Support was available through the IT Help Center.

Migration of courses hosted by Distance Education into the onlinecampus.bu.edu learning space took place over Intersession. Distance Education Instructional Designers will began building content in the production system on November 1, 2012.

Production Phase

Full production began with the Spring 2013 semester. The system is now available to all faculty at a full deployment level.

Decommissioning Phase

This phase removes the extra LMS instances after the consolidation has occurred. Different systems will take different paths and follow a customized schedule.

After the migration from Distance Education’s Blackboard Learn, that instance will be decommissioned. The Blackboard Learn single instance is able to restore all archived courses created in Blackboard 9.1 for Distance Education.

Blackboard 8 will no longer be available after Summer 2013 and all course will be available for restoration into the Blackboard Learn instance.