Students looking to access Blackboard this week should have more success than they did last week.
The Internet course resource, which the Penn library system runs, first experienced system failure last Wednesday. It has seen intermittent access problems ever since, according to Public Services Director for the Penn library system Sandra Kerbel.
The difficulties come at an especially inconvenient time, since students frequently visit the site to obtain resources relevant to upcoming midterms.
Blackboard "currently appears to be stable, but we don't believe we have fully isolated the problem," Kerbel said, saying future service interruptions were possible.
Kerbel said that through dialogue with Blackboard officials, Penn Information Systems and Computing and Sun Microsystems, the cause of the problem has been pinpointed to software that underlies the Blackboard application, specifically to data switching points.
The involved parties will continue to troubleshoot and monitor support requests until problems with the application are fully resolved.
Psychology professor Sharon Thompson-Schill, whose class had an exam last Thursday, said that she received frantic e-mails the night before the test from students who were not able to access PowerPoint slides and other class materials on Blackboard.
Having experienced technical problems with Blackboard in past semesters, Thompson-Schill now conducts discussion sessions for her class via e-mail, even though she believes the Blackboard discussion forum, if reliable, would be more convenient.
As a result of her recent experience, she plans on warning future classes to download their slides early in the semester in case they cannot access them during the exam period.
"You need to plan on Blackboard being down," Thompson-Schill said, adding that she wished there were some kind of backup system.
Kerbel said that officials might debate such a system once they fully stabilize the site.
"Building a redundant [backup] system is costly," Kerbel said. "We would have to replicate what we are currently paying for Blackboard."
While Kerbel did not specify exactly how much the University spends on Blackboard, she did say that expenses include Blackboard's annual licensing fee, software and hardware costs, and maintenance and support fees.
Craig Chanoff, vice president for client services at Blackboard, said that the technical problems Penn's site is experiencing are not atypical, since Blackboard is a complex application with "many moving parts."
He added that Blackboard officials are using all the resources at their disposal to help Penn officials quickly resolve the problem.
"Ultimately, when Blackboard is down, learning stops," he said.
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