Blackboard Vista AP2

After months of internal testing by ITS, the e-Learning Center, and NAU faculty, Blackboard Vista—NAU’s enterprise course management system—was updated to the current product release in August. Blackboard Vista version 4.2.1 brings greater stability, security enhancements, and significant usability improvements. Application Pack 2 should be the most stable and easiest version of Vista yet.

With AP2, Blackboard has resolved several of the most frustrating support issues for end users. The most significant is support for up-to-date Java runtime environments on client machines. Before AP2, the latest versions of the Sun Java client (JRE) weren’t supported by Blackboard Vista, and this lack of support caused errors. Users could not run the most recent and secure versions of the JRE, which lead to frustration and calls to the help desk. This is now resolved with support for all versions of the JRE, including Java 6 and Windows Vista, on all major browsers.

In the spring and summer 2007 semesters, Blackboard Vista had several unplanned outages that affected students and instructors. Of these, approximately half were caused by a multithreading bug that is resolved in this new release. AP2 has also fixed another persistent issue, which meant that most of the problems encountered in the past required us to stop and restart the entire system. With this problem solved, most of the issues that have caused an unexpected outage in the past can now be resolved by restarting only a portion of the system and, more importantly, without any disruption to users.

Instructors who use Blackboard Vista will see several enhancements with this release as well. Problems that previously prevented students from being un-enrolled from courses in Blackboard Vista have been resolved so that course rosters again accurately reflect the true course roster. Instructors no longer have to deal with collections of access-denied students in their grade books. The assignment drop-box tool now sorts assignments properly, and there are new grade release criteria along with myriad other enhancements that will help instructors and students work with Vista.

For more information contact the e-Learning center at elc-help@nau.edu or call (928) 523-5554.