Virtual Snow Day - Technology reliance?

An interesting problem has come up at Baker College. Baker is one of the biggest users of BlackBoard, a commonly used web teaching platform.

Baker's BlackBoard implementation went out due to technical problems on Wednesday and won't be back probably until Friday at 9pm. With a program that has 6 week classes, this sort of outage is a challenge to students and faculty in classes.

This sort of outage has occurred at other BlackBoard sites - and I'm sure has happened with WebCT, e-Univeristy, etc. The question it raises is to what extent are DL programs dependent on immature technology.

Regards - Andy

 

Just an update; now Baker is saying they won't be up until Saturday evening at 7:00. I have just started there and this has occured on week two. However, I do realize that this is not the norm with Baker. They have done a good job keeping the students informed via email as to how long they anticipate being down, and what they are doing to correct the situation. The downside is I have limited study time, due to working a full time job, and parenting two young children. I now fear that my grade for this weeks seminar may suffer due to this misfortunate incident, at this point they are saying that the assignments we received via email are still due on the normal due dates

Philly

 

virtual snow day

Baker did not meet their Sat. 7:00 estimation to have the Blackboard back online. It is now Sunday 10:00, and they are now posting they are unable to predict when they will have the system restored.