After weeks of Beachboard being either inaccessible or slow for professors and students, Cal State Long Beach Provost Donald Para said at a Tuesday meeting that the immediate solution to the problem is to switch to an independent server.
The independent server will not have any other operations and will run faster, according Vice President of Administration and Finance Mary Stephens.
However, Stephens said that it is too early to say whether the server is a long or short-term solution.
Para also announced Tuesday through an email to faculty that the university is searching for a Chief Information/Technology Officer (CIO), who would oversee Beachboard along with other academic technology services once hired.
Beachboard is powered by the company Desire2Learn, the LMS server that CSULB switched to from Blackboard in 2010.
Desire2Learn said Tuesday that the system’s inaccessibility was caused by issues with its cloud data centers.
“What happened is one of our cloud data centers was having an outage that was impacting some of the students’ online experience,” Virginia Jamieson, senior director of corporate communications at Desire2Learn, said. “It stemmed from file virtualization hardware that wasn’t interacting well with the storage environment, and some students had trouble accessing the system.”
According to Jamieson, 25 percent of all institutions, including other universities and businesses, were having trouble accessing the system from Jan. 29 to Friday.
Jamieson said that this problem had never occurred before.
Para said in an email to faculty on Thursday that the situation was unacceptable.
“Desire2Learn, the [Learning Management System] provider, through poor internal communication, decided to make major changes in their system during a time of very heavy use,” Para said in an email interview.
Para said Deire2Learn admits that this was a very poor decision, as stated in a letter from President and CEO of Desire2Learn John Baker to students on Beachboard. He said that there will be a debriefing with the president of Desire2Learn sometime this week.
Professors and students said they were frustrated with the technical hiccups at the beginning of the semester because they were trying to access syllabi, assignments and other course documents that would otherwise be a click away.
“It caused a huge inconvenience for me,” Vince Solis, a freshman creative writing major, said. “I couldn’t access a bunch of HTML templates. I had to turn in some work late, and I couldn’t see my syllabi … It was awful. I hated it.”
In order to “deliver technology … in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible,” Para said the university will conduct a national search to appoint the first CIO of CSULB.
According to an email sent to CSULB faculty by Para, the CIO will replace the position of the associate vice president for academic technology, which has been not been filled since July 2011.
“A search firm familiar with searches for CIOs will be selected to assist with the search,” Para said. “A search committee, representing all four divisions of the university, will be established very soon.”
The CIO will oversee the existing IT organizations on campus, which will eventually merge into one organization, according to Stephens.
The existing organizations include academic technology services, which handles Beachboard and student services, and administrative technology services, according to Stephens.
However, Stephens said that delays in Beachboard and the decision to instigate a national search for a CIO did not result from Desire2Learn complications.
Discussions of a CIO hire have been in the works for more than a year, according to Stephens. After Proposition 30 passed, funding for a CIO became possible.
Assistant City Editor Shane Newell and Laura Tejero contributed to this report.
