1. Course Management System (Blackboard)
Todd Maniscalco and J.P. Brannan February 23, 2016

2. Agenda Introductions Service Description Value Proposition Metrics
Cost
Security
More information
Q&A

3. Introductions Service owner: Todd Maniscalco
Service manager: Marina Tokman
Other service delivery team members (3 FTE):
J.P. Brannan
Kelly Chan
Patrick Graham
John Udall
Instructional Designers as Needed

4. Why Blackboard?
The course management system market is rapidly growing and changing, as are teaching needs.
Cornell stakeholders periodically evaluate available products and decide on a solution.
Blackboard is popular because its range of features is broad enough to meet multiple differing faculty and student needs.
Blackboard is scalable to serve the entire campus.
User roles in Blackboard allow for distributed course administration.

5. Service Description Service name: Course Management System
Product: Blackboard (single-product offering)
Description:
Blackboard is the cloud-hosted web-based course management system, selected by university stakeholders, which enables instructors to manage materials distribution, assignments, communications, and other aspects of instruction for their courses.
Available to:
Faculty, Instructional Professionals, Students, Guests
Fee to end user? No
Service tier: One

6. Value Proposition Value proposition Customer impact Key benefits
Cost Savings through aggregation of demand
Cost Savings through vendor hosting and management
Centralization to mitigate policy and security risks
Easily enroll people who don’t have NetIDs
Customer impact
Students can access course materials 24/7 in one location
Students can hand in assignments online and track graded work
Instructors can manage materials online in one location
Key benefits
Single sign-on plus guest logins
Managed Enrollment
Consistent learning environment for students
Central hub for access to other instructional technologies

7. Instructional Services Integrations
Plagiarism Detection
(Turnitin)
Via Blackboard API and LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability)
SIS (Peoplesoft)
Classroom Polling
(i>clicker)
Blackboard
ePortfolios (Digication)
Course site request
Term-based managed enrollment
Lecture Capture (Panopto)
Video Streaming
(Kaltura)
Online Training
(Lynda.com)
Library Reserves
(Ares )
Publisher Tools (Pearson, others)

8. Metrics
Oct 2015
Nov 2015
Dec 2015
Average peak usage (Approx Sessions)
58,699
54,887
49,676
Peak Date
10/5/15
11/2/15
12/9/15
Number of Active Courses
4,516
4,368
4,260
Number of Active Users
22,041
21,048
21,421
Number of Instructors
6,283
6,312
6,362
Page Views on Most Active Date
551,639
507,219
457,946
Average Page Views Per Day
364,920
317,929
236,279
Total Monthly Logins na
311,235
237,310
Bandwidth Usage (kbps)
34,558
32,877
38,925
See Full Quarterly Report Online at

9. Cost Cost to deliver the service: Fee for service: None
Net-Plus contract bundle.
FY 16 Total Cost
$715,218
Hardware & Software
$346,179
Labor
$304,019
Staff Support
$32,510
Administrative Overhead

10. Cost Per Unit Total Annual Cost: $715,218
Average # of courses hosted annually: 4,174
Average # of unique users served annually: 21,000
Cost per Course: $171.35
Cost per User: $34
Marginal Costs:
HW costs are flat/fixed per the cloud-hosting contract.
Licensing and Hosting costs are flat until we exceed 25,000 simultaneous users.
Labor costs for user support will increase as users/courses are added.
Cost per course - does not include schools that are in process of on-boarding such as the Vet School, more effort with Art & Sciences specifically the Language Dept

11. Security What risks does use of the service mitigate?
Reputational harm
Information security
Compliance with regulations and university policies
How does the service mitigate risks?
Safe default configuration
Contractual constraints
Vendor-hosted in cloud datacenters with redundancy

12. More information Service web page: it.cornell.edu/services/blackboard
Service level expectations:
Service catalog entry:
catalog.it.cornell.edu/admin/16
Service quarterly report: cio.cornell.edu/resources/it-reports-documents-and-presentations/itcornell-quarterly-metrics/course-management

13. Questions? Todd Maniscalco: tam42@cornell.edu
J.P. Brannan:
Consulting/Training support: