Information Technology Services

Who: Campus Community

What: UNCG/NC A&T Blackboard Hosting FAQ

In fall 2006, the President's Advisory Committee on Effectiveness and Efficiency (PACE) began looking at ways in which sister schools within the UNC System might collaborate to become more efficient and effective. A study of possible system-wide approaches to course management systems is underway at the General Administration (GA) level. By collaborating on Blackboard hosting, UNCG and NC A&T hope to meet immediate needs for improved service to students and faculty, while providing a foundation for future collaboration in the UNC System.

What is UNCG ITS providing to NC A&T in this hosting arrangement?
UNCG is providing the physical environment for NC A&T's Blackboard servers, including the network connectivity, electricity, HVAC, UPS, fire suppression, backups and server management.

Will this hosting arrangement diminish Blackboard support resources for UNCG?
In this hosting arrangement, UNCG is effectively serving as the internet service provider (ISP) for NC A&T's Blackboard environment. The impact of adding several servers and a database instance to our production data center environment will have minimal impact on Information Technology Services (ITS) resources beyond the initial configuration period.

Note: Neither UNCG ITS nor TLC staff are providing application or end user support for NC A&T Blackboard users. NC A&T will continue to manage all of its own application administration and end user support.

What impact will the shared environment have on UNCG? Do both Universities have to be on the same version of Blackboard? Do both Universities have to upgrade on the same schedule?

In this hosting arrangement, NC A&T has its own production and test application environments running on NC A&T servers that are hosted at UNCG. What this means is that UNCG and NC A&T are running separate Blackboard application environments that are independent of one another. Both Universities are independent with respect to the configuration of the Blackboard application on each campus, including the version of Blackboard each runs and the upgrade schedule that each chooses for their campus.

When will this happen?
The hosting environment has been built, and NC A&T's servers are already installed and running at UNCG. UNCG ITS is currently working with the NC A&T Blackboard support team to test the new environment. The new service will go live for NC A&T in January of 2008.

For more information, please contact 6-TECH at (336) 256-TECH (8324).