Blackboard will be unavailable Dec. 23–27 for planned migration to SaaS (Software as a Service). Rest assured, during this migration, we are not heading south for the winter. Blackboard will be migrating to a different kind of environment without much change to our users.

Please be sure to plan accordingly for this migration timeline. After the system is available, faculty may once again generate course materials and finish their preparations for J-Term and spring courses.

Our move to Blackboard’s SaaS (Software as a Service) will make new tools available and position Drake to provide better online offerings for years to come. The planned migration from managed hosting, which is housed on Blackboard’s servers, to SaaS, hosted on Amazon Web Services data centers, will occur during winter break to have the least amount of impact.

Once the migration takes place, we will continue running the current experience on Blackboard known as version 9.1. By moving to SaaS, we gain some major benefits from the new environment, which will allow us to make future upgrades and patches to our environment with little to no downtime.

Karly Good, ITS