There could be changes on the horizon for Blackboard, Texas A&M University-San Antonio’s learning management system.
University officials discussed upgrading Blackboard at the October Faculty Senate meeting while talking about the new role for the Center for Academic Innovation.
Dr. Mohamed Abdelrahman, A&M-San Antonio’s provost and vice president for academic affairs, said while it’s not financially viable for the school to switch to a different LMS entirely, there are options to upgrade Blackboard.
Dr. Kathryn Appenzeller Knowles, interim director of the CAI and director of quantitative reasoning at A&M-San Antonio, described two options available to A&M-San Antonio. The first upgrade would be primarily cosmetic.
“One of them wouldn’t change how the information and content is organized within Blackboard,” Knowles said. “It’s more of an update so that it doesn’t look or feel as old, but it’s not going to change the functionality.”
The second option presented by Knowles would upgrade the functionality, but would require preparation and training before it could be implemented.
“That’s not something we would want to just turn on and say ‘Good luck everyone,’” Knowles said. “We would want to be able to support faculty in training … before we just roll it out to the entire campus.”
The group also discussed having representatives from Blackboard present the two options to the senate but no decision was made during the meeting.
Both options are already part of A&M-San Antonio’s current LMS agreement with Blackboard, according to Knowles.
