This is a guest post by Johnathan Flowers, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Worcester State University, Worcester, Massachusetts
It is my view that online teaching should always be informed by infrastructure limitations of our learning management systems (LMS) and our institutions. By infrastructure limitations, I mean both the physical infrastructure, as in the local and cloud servers that host our LMS and the physical connection of our campus to the internet, as well as the digital infrastructure of the LMS itself, or the availability of specific features of the LMS under the strain of multiple users under less than ideal conditions. To this end, this piece will focus on structural considerations where online teaching is concerned.
I will address concerns with physical infrastructure first. Most institutions have a sufficiently robust infrastructure to meet the needs of both students and faculty. In fact, most institutions rarely exceed the capacity provided by their local internet connections. As an example, the closest my institution has come to exceeding its capacity for internet connectivity was during the recent release of major updates to the first-person shooter, Call of Duty: Warzone, and the MMORPG Division 2. With students and faculty away from campus, and not using the institution’s connection, there is little risk to exceeding the institution’s available capacity.
Not every institution has a robust internet connection: many rural or underfunded institutions may not have sufficient capacity to maintain stable connectivity to their web-hosted portals. Library websites, institutional websites, and other crucial forms of information made available to students and faculty through institutional web portals may become unavailable during times of increased load. While this does not directly impact student use of online learning and LMS, it does impact student ability to access those LMS and online resources should they not have the resources themselves bookmarked.
These issues can be resolved relatively quickly under normal conditions: IT can establish alternate portals to ensure availability or can take actions to limit the strain on web portals by through other technological remedies. However, these are not normal conditions. The speed at which our IT support personnel can respond to overloaded or crashed websites is dependent upon the availability of those personnel, and their ability to address a problem remotely as many may not be on campus during the pandemic. Further, in a remote work situation, with IT Help Desk lines forwarded to personal or home phones, IT support may be quickly overloaded with requests to address crashed websites or portals and may be unable to respond with their typical speed.
As someone who has worked with and for campus information technology services as a faculty and an employee, here are some recommendations to minimize the strain on IT personnel.
- Reach out to your senior most IT personnel to determine the best means to submit help requests in the event of a remote work situation. Standard mechanisms may be inadequate or insufficient to handle a large volume of requests.
- Reach out to your senior most IT personnel to determine the appropriate information to submit in the event of outage. Not all information will be valuable to address the issue and providing the most helpful information to your IT personnel can speed their response to your issue.
- Be patient with your IT personnel as they may be experiencing increased call volume. That was a joke, but one that is grounded in reality: your IT help center and help desks may be overloaded in the event of a major outage.
- Your IT personnel may not be able to address every issue that arises with online teaching or with your LMS. Some issues must be outsourced to the LMS providers, particularly if the LMS operates on a software-as-a-service model.
- If you have concerns about your specific LMS installation, consult the LMS help pages. As an example, for Blackboard, consult blackboard.com for specific advice.
The other aspect of infrastructure concerns that educators should bear in mind are the infrastructure limitations of the LMS itself. To understand this point, we have to take a walk through the architecture of a LMS, Blackboard in this example. That said, it needs to be stressed that each of LMS has different attributes and features which means that the infrastructures have different kinds of limitations and should be considered differently.
Blackboard is the LMS that I have, unfortunately, become most familiar with as it is the LMS that it in use at my current institution. In strict technological terms, Blackboard is a portal-based LMS that combines a collection of features intended to supplement in person courses with online features or to enable the development of fully online courses. The Blackboard LMS can be installed locally on an institution’s servers or it can be hosted through the Blackboard Application Server Provider (ASP) services.
The difference between the two is that the local installation is hosted on-site by an institution, and the ASP installation is a cloud-based product hosted on servers in Blackboard’s many data centers. Institutions that use the Blackboard ASP are therefore reliant upon Blackboard’s own hosting capacity and support personnel in the event of an physical infrastructure failure, whereas the locally hosted installation draws upon the institution’s own technical support for maintenance. Educators should take steps to determine which variation of Blackboard they are as they transition online to learn how to best address their concerns.
In both contexts, Blackboard itself is not simply a single platform but a suite of services made accessible through the Blackboard portal. Remember the discussion about institutional web hosting? This is where that conversation becomes more pressing. If the institution’s home portal goes down under increased user strain, then access to the Blackboard suite may become unavailable. The Blackboard installation may still be present in the cloud or on the locally hosted servers, however, users may not be able to access the institution’s own Blackboard installation because the portal, the means of access to the collection of services is unavailable. Think of it in this context: if the Facebook login page were to suddenly crash, all the Facebook pages would still be available through their own links, but we might we unable to log in to the site itself.
That said, what do I mean by “Blackboard suite?” Well, this image from status.blackboard.com should make the meaning clear:
Blackboard is not the only LMS system that functions as a suite of services: Canvas is also structured as a suite of semi-autonomous services. This image from status.instructure.com indicates the variety of Canvas services. Additionally, Canvas’ status page provides users with the means to check the status of a specific canvas instance through a search engine. Canvas’ services are depicted below:
Moodle, due to its open-source nature, has a different suite of functions, as indicated by status.moodle.com but similar consideration should be made with regards to its functionality:
To return to Blackboard, each of the services that makes up an individual institution’s Blackboard LMS has a different status which is independent of other services in the LMS suite. As an example, “Analytics – Managed Hosting” has a service icon under its current status, whereas all of the other services have green online icons next to them. As a combination of the services listed above represents the whole of an institution’s Blackboard suite, each institution’s Blackboard installation will be different. Moreover, as the services which make up each combination are independent of one another, an individual service may fail independently of the whole installation.
What this means for instructors is that an individual element of our Blackboard LMS may fail while others may remain online. Collaborate, for instance, might fail under increased user load while Analytics for Learn might remain online during Collaborate’s failure. Moreover, a failure of one Blackboard service does not necessarily mean the failure of all services associated with that Blackboard installation. Thus, depending on the kinds of services an individual educator is using, students may experience inconsistent accessibility for some features throughout the transition online as the LMS struggles to cope with the influx of new users.
Understanding Blackboard as a collection of services accessed through a portal should not only affect the ways that educators structure and develop their individual courses for online delivery, but how they respond to student complaints that Blackboard is “down.” A student might send an e-mail indicating that Blackboard is “down” because they cannot access course readings hosted on the LMS, or that they could not submit their work because Blackboard is “down,” and educators should take seriously the fact that they might be telling the truth, even if the entire installation remains active.
Blackboard, fortunately seems to be aware of the potential for service failures in the wake of the current situation, as the following message appears on the help.blackboard.com website:
But what does that mean for all of the recommendations that have been made for innovative, high-impact online teaching in our present situation? Everything: the majority of our innovative teaching practices are dependent upon the availability of many of the critical services provided by our LMS’: if those services fail under the influx of courses going online, a course built around these services will be unable to provide comprehensive education. As an example, a course that uses synchronous learning through Blackboard Collaborate will be more impacted if the Collaborate service fails under increased demand, particularly if there are many courses attempting to use collaborate simultaneously.
Collaborate is a good example of a service that can be supplemented or replaced by other services. Zoom, as an example, is a teleconferencing service that has been touted as a replacement for face to face classes as well as an alternative to Blackboard Collaborate in the event of a service failure. However, Zoom comes with limitations: Zoom free account members are being alerted to the possibility that their access to dial-in services may be restricted due to increased demand. Coupled with this is Zoom’s internal limitations on participants when using a free Zoom account: free accounts have a limit of forty minutes on calls with more than three users, which will limit the use of Zoom for courses longer than an hour. As a result, without an institutional license, Zoom may cease to be a viable alternative to Blackboard Collaborate or face to face classes.
Zoom itself is also a collection of services, a teleconferencing suite, and instructors should check to see if the service they intend to use is active before setting up a meeting. Zoom’s status, as indicated by status.zoom.us is indicated below:
In general, the following recommendations with regards to understanding the infrastructure limitations of our LMS and other alternative services should be borne in mind:
- Reach out to your local IT professionals to determine what kind of LMS infrastructure your campus is using and how that infrastructure may or may not be affected by increased user load.
- Plan around the failure of one or more LMS services and develop backup options. As an example, consider creating a google drive folder for students to submit work to rather than relying on the LMS’ own structures. Consider using a google drive folder to host course readings.
- Assume honesty of your students when they report outages and failures in your online course shells, or the services attached to those shells. Plan for these outages and provide students with alternative structures to compensate.
- Even if all LMS or alternative service systems remain operational, access to these systems is limited by technological and bandwidth considerations. Do not assume that all students will have access to the necessary technology or internet connection to participate fully in innovative online learning.
- Once again, If you have concerns about your specific LMS installation, consult the LMS help pages. As an example, for Blackboard, consult blackboard.com for specific advice.
Finally, our approaches to online teaching should also be informed by the limitations of our students’ own access to our LMS and campus infrastructures, including those limitations that emerge from unequal access to high-speed internet, unequal access to computing technology, and unequal access to basic education regarding both the use of technology broadly and the use of our LMS specifically. Zoom, for example, is dependent upon a user’s available bandwidth: zoom has a minimum bandwidth is 600kbps (up/down) and a recommended bandwidth or 1.5 Mbps (up/down).
LMS should have a responsive design so that users can access the LMS from whatever type of device they choose and a user-friendly interface to enable learners to easily navigate the LMS platform. https://www.royal4.com/warehouse-management-software/
Posted by: Andrew | 02/15/2022 at 01:10 PM