Stop the world! I wanna get off!!
If Murphy’s Law can have global warming, that’s what we’ve got here.
First day of class. All my coursework is neatly online. It has, some of you may recall, taken weeks of 16-hour days to mount this stuff on BlackBoard, the courseware that ate Philadelphia.
Today I needed my students to access the site, in class, to download materials, to upload short in-class essays… Wednesday they have two assignments due in this system.
You see where we’re going here… OF COURSE the goddamned BlackBoard system is DOWN! It’s having a FRENZY OF INSTABILITY.
Is it my sweet little college that’s brought this on? Hell, no. It’s the vendor. BlackBoard. Blackboard Freaking Inc. Tina forwarded a memo from the university’s IT people saying they expect it to be nonfunctional for a week or more. GDU is activating its emergency backup system; meanwhile, it’s telling faculty to post materials somewhere else, Google Docs or wherever the hell they can figure out to get online.
Luckily, I knew this was going to happen.
You develop an instinct for these things, after you’ve worked with BlackBoard long enough. So I created a WordPress.com site as my own fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants backup. It’s just a blog and its interactivity is limited to comments. But at least it can hold the most crucial course material, for the nonce, and I can communicate with the little things. The papers they’re doing next week will just have to be printed out. Just what I needed…to have to touch paper. The dratted stuff has acid in it, you know. Burns your fingers.
Ah, but that wasn’t all.
No. Not all. This morning the iMac’s hard drive crashed, once and for all. Down and out. Blue Screen of Death, accompanied by weird Knock of Death. That will be $260, thank you, and say goodbye to all your programs and data.
Luckily, I knew this was going to happen.
One could do without it happening on the first day of class. But thank goodness everything of any import was backed up to an external hard drive, except for a small project I finished about 11:00 last night. Not pleased about having to do that four hours of work over, but it’s a heckuva lot better than having to do four months’ worth of work over.
And boy, am I glad I sprang for the extra coins to get the MacBook! The iMac got cloned onto this handy laptop computer, and so life goes on, with few interruptions. The 87 gerjillion passwords the iMac had memorized have to be looked up and entered into this unit. But otherwise, the system is much the same. And the repair dudes should be able to clone the MacBook back onto the new iMac hard drive.
All that notwithstanding, it’s been one hellish day.
Image: Edvard Munch, The Scream. Public Domain
Blackboard–it is now a monopoly?–is full of problems. I don’t use it that much, myself (beyond what is required).
I do know that your students aren’t as upset about it as you are. (But they will blame you for all problems…)
@ Frugal Scholar: Apparently on the ASU campus and all over the community college district, the little things are hysterical. Librarian called this afternoon, said students are running around in a panic. Many of them have assignments due now, today, through BB and are terrified because they can’t get them to their professors. Twitter also describes students panicky over not being able to get at their coursework.
My classroom is jammed with nontraditional students, about 90 percent of whom are pretty serious folk. Not only do they take the course seriously, they’re working and so the time they have available to do the coursework is limited.
I think BB is pretty close to a monopoly now. It squeezed out FirstClass, which (it must be admitted) was a bit primitive. BUT…FirstClass didn’t go down every time a feather floated out of the sky.