Mercer Online, Blackboard and the MyMercer portal need to be functional at all times and they haven’t been.
On January 22, the second day of the new semester, the MyMercer portal was down for two hours. What this meant was that there was no access to Blackboard or Mercer Online. These are the places where students and faculty find out their classroom numbers, see what the work is for online classes, get email and so on.
The outage caused people to wander the halls trying to figure out where their classes were. Even the registrar could not access the system to print out student schedules.
Faculty were stuck, too. It was one of the last days for online winter session classes and students couldn’t submit their work, and faculty couldn’t grade it.
President Dr. Jianping Wang said, “I know at the beginning of the semester there was a brief Internet outage and it was back on very quickly, but I don’t know more than that.”
When the system doesn’t work, it’s not just a minor inconvenience. We’ve been asked (forced, honestly) to rely on it and now we do, so when it doesn’t work it’s a major headache for everyone. If it’s down for a half an hour, multiply that by the number of students and staff who need it at that time and you begin to see the scale of the problem.
“This is the second time it has been down in the last 12 months” stated President Wang.
That’s two times too many, and frankly, we’ve all had problems with BlackBoard more often than that. Again, minimizing the significance by acting like it was only for a little while ignores just how necessary the services are to our day to day success.
We pay fees to ensure the technology functions properly and it is part of ensuring we get the education we came for.
Students pay a $24.50 per credit technology fee according to Dr. Robert Schreyer, Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs.
This adds up to $73.50 per three-credit course. Mercer has about 7,000 students. If each student were to take at least one three-credit course, that’s $514,500 total in technology fees alone.
That is enough money to upgrade Mercer’s server size so this does not happen again.
When we tried to get to the bottom of the problem we were given the run around. Ellucian, the company that provides Mercer Online, told the VOICE to “contact IT.”
Rowan University also uses Blackboard. When asked if they had experienced issues with Blackboard recently, Bianca Martinez, a Mercer alumn and current Rowan student, stated, “With Blackboard specifically, no.” She noted that the Internet was sometimes spotty, but that’s a different matter.
According to Ellucian’s website, they serve more than 650 schools, and MCCC is even given a special page in its list of success stories. In the results section of that page it reads:
“Results:
- Students get a real-time, complete picture of their progress toward a degree
- Registration is faster and easier than ever
- Advisors have more time to make deeper connections with students”
You don’t get a real-time picture of anything if the system is down. We could quibble about the other points, too, but those are issues for another day.
In the end, we shouldn’t be paying for something that does not work when we need it the most. Either change the service provider, don’t charge us the fees, or get it fixed once and for all, preferably the latter.
