Blackboard will be unavailable between Friday, December 20 at 5 PM and Thursday, January 2 at 6 AM.

Over the winter break, ACC will be migrating and upgrading Blackboard.  The upgrade will provide ACC with:

• Improved scalability
• Faster rollout of new features
• More flexibility in the future

To facilitate these changes, Blackboard will be unavailable over the winter break.  At 5 PM Dec 20th, ACC’s Blackboard environment will be disabled and no longer available to users.  A holding page will provide updates as to the progress of the migration and Blackboard’s availability. Our new production environment will be accessible by Jan 2, 2020.

The migration to managed hosting is a large undertaking and will require significant time to execute.  Test migrations have indicated that we will be working under a tight timeline that may be subject to change.  In the event of any problems, we will provide updates on the status page at: https://acconline.austincc.edu

The following are some changes you will see in the new environment:

Deprecated Features

Online Attendance

The Online Attendance tool will no longer be supported after the fall 2019 semester.  This tool has been replaced with Qwickly Attendance. More information on Qwickly can be found at: https://de.austincc.edu/support/faculty/qwickly-course-availability/

New Features

Cloud integration

Instructors can copy files from their favorite cloud storage solutions when authoring Content Items or creating Assignments. Students can also submit assignments from their favorite cloud storage solutions. Cloud storage that is supported includes OneDrive, OneDrive for Business, Google Drive including G suite accounts, Dropbox, and Box.

Audio/Video Feedback

An instructor or grader can create personalized feedback recordings for individual assessment attempts or manual grade center items. Each recording can be up to 5 minutes long and can be both video and audio. The option appears in the third row of the Content Editor as a microphone icon.

The following feedback locations are supported:

• Assignment
• Test
• Graded Discussion
• Graded Wiki
• Graded Blog
• Graded Journal
• Feedback in a manual grade column

Students will see icons representing recordings that they can select to start streaming playback of the video on their computer or mobile device.

Thank you for your patience during this migration, any questions regarding the migration can be sent to blackboard@austincc.edu.  We hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season!

Seth Wilkerson

Sr Manager, LMS Services

Office of Information Technology

512-223-1258