Temporary Halt to New Blackboard Integrations

Temporary Halt to New Blackboard Integrations

• October 15th, 2018
• in Announcements

The UA Blackboard Learn team has made the decision to halt all pending integrations until an audit of our existing integrations and the potential issues they may cause is complete.

Early in the Fall 2018 semester, UA’s Blackboard Learn system went completely down twice in one week. The downtimes were minimized to about 30 minutes each due to the quick action of our Bb and UA support teams. An incident analysis revealed that the outage was caused by a malfunctioning grade synch process used by a textbook publisher integration. Although this integration is only used by about 10 of the 7000 UA fall classes in Blackboard Learn, many thousands of users were affected by the outage.

In the interest of preventing future performance issues, UA’s Blackboard team has decided to audit and reevaluate the 130+ integrations currently in place. We also plan to strengthen our guidelines for vetting and testing integrations. Once those tasks are done, we will be able to consider new integration requests again. No existing integrations will be removed or altered without communicating with users.