Although students and teachers may be breathing a tentative sigh of relief after Beachboard has been up and running for almost an entire week, for administrators, the headache is far from over.
At an Academic Senate meeting on Thursday, Cal State Long Beach Provost Donald Para addressed what caused the untimely and extended crash of Beachboard and what is being done to ensure that a similar situation will not occur again.
According to Para, technicians for Desire2Learn, the company that provides Beachboard, decided to undergo a major upgrade without a backup system at the beginning of the semester.
“It went down, it didn’t work, and they had no backup system,” Para said during the meeting. “That’s a lack of communication. That’s bad business practice, and all of us and our students are the ones that suffered as a result. That’s what happened, and there is going to be an ongoing conversation with D2L.”
CSULB was a part of 25 percent of Desire2Learn’s clientele that lost service as a result of the mishandled upgrades. In order to rectify the situation, Desire2Learn has since put CSULB on its own server.
“[D2L is] coming to campus next week because we are a big user of theirs and they feel really badly about this, to say the least,” Para said. “D2L promised [to provide] a detailed report as to what happened. They promised to include us in their future plans and how they plan for this not happen again.”
The three-year $366,000 contract with Desire2Learn expires at the end of June, according to Para. The contract partners Desire2Learn and the Cal State University Chancellor’s office. Multiple CSU campuses were moving to use Desire2Learn as their provider, and CSULB was able to get the service at a reduced price, according to Para.
In the contract, it states that Desire2Learn is supposed to provide 99.9 percent ‘up-time.’ As a result of the recent issues, Para said there is no guarantee that CSULB will renew its contract.
Chair of the Academic Senate Daniel O’Connor said that a switch to another learning management system provider would be very time consuming and costly.
“From a completely other angle about the idea of ‘Hey let’s switch over to something that’s cheaper and better,’ I just want you to take into effect the tens of thousands of individuals who are involved in this, and especially for staff, who have to do this on a daily basis, the training regimen they would have to undergo, the investment and cost,” O’Connor said. “We’re not stuck with it indefinitely, and we kind of have a pretty decent bargaining position as we go into the next negotiations.”
O’Connor and Para both assured the Academic Senate that students and faculty will be the first to know the next time there are complications with Beachboard in an effort to minimize any negative effects on class functioning.
“When the system begins to slow down or shut down, a communication will be sent out so that you’re not at home at two in the morning wondering, ‘Is it my lousy laptop? Is it my Wi-Fi? What’s going on here?'” O’Connor said. “We are working on developing a communication system to let faculty know that the system is running low, just to save time and effort.”
