LETTER TO THE EDITOR
I am responding to the editorial written in February’s edition of the Voice titled “No more excuses, no more outages.” The editorial was about the outage, which occurred on January 22, 2020. I am Vicente Erazo, Manager, MercerOnline and our team is responsible for managing the Blackboard learning management system for the College.
MercerOnline is separate department from our Information Technology (IT) group, which manages Ellucian and MyMercer (the Portal). Ellucian does not manage Blackboard or MercerOnline. But we do collaborate together.
What is MercerOnline and what do we do?
MercerOnline is the distance-learning department. We manage the administration of Blackboard. We provide technical support for online /hybrid courses and system support to students and faculty. We train faculty on Blackboard. We provide students Blackboard information sessions at the beginning of each of the 14 week and 10 week terms. We may be contacted through email, phone and in CM120 on the West Windsor campus. We support over 1000 courses in each term period.
Yes, your article is correct students were not able to access Blackboard during the outage. Blackboard was not down. It was not accessible because the MyMercer portal was not available to students or faculty.
MyMercer provides a single sign-on point for students, faculty and staff to access resources in a centralized place. It is a convenience because each user only signs in once and gains access to a number of systems. Unfortunately, the downside to this convenience as we’ve seen is that when the portal is down students and faculty cannot access the portal or any connected services, including Blackboard.
The article did help us look at our understanding of user issues and our support. Over the next months we are taking a series of actions to better understand where we can provide user training and guidance to make using Blackboard easier.
For Faculty:
• Attend division meetings to gauge the faculty needs and issues they may be encountering in Blackboard.
• Contact program coordinators to obtain their perception of how to make use easier.
• Re-evaluate our Blackboard faculty training and help videos to improve their effectiveness.
• Holding a MercerOnline Day on March 31st. where our Blackboard Client Success Manager will address faculty and demo “Ultra” an enhanced user interface provided by Blackboard.
For Students:
• Send a survey to students to gain insight into issues and their perspective on Blackboard’s usability.
• Re –evaluating and redesigning our student help videos.
• Changing our Blackboard Information sessions to emphasize Blackboard use and the tools students use regularly.
• Creating information about best practices for completing an online course.
• Developing an alternative access point to provide users during a portal outage.
We also plan to work with marketing to make the MercerOnline team better known to students as well as faculty, so they know whom to contact if they encounter technical issues with Blackboard.
My goal is to help students and faculty be successful by making the use of the tool as easy as possible. Our office door is open for anyone to come in and give us feedback or concerns. I can also be reached directly at erazov@mccc.edu or by phone at 609-570-3336.
Sincerely,
Vicente Erazo
Manager – MercerOnline, erazov@mccc.edu , 609-570-3336, merceronline@mccc.edu, 609 570 3389
