Course Size Strategy
Earlier this year, the OAK Steering Committee approved a decision to transition OAK to what’s called “managed hosting.” OAK is powered by the course management system Blackboard. We have run Blackboard on Vanderbilt web servers since the system was adopted about a decade ago. This winter, OAK will be moving to Blackboard servers, a move that will result in improved reliability and performance and a better experience for faculty and students. Moving to managed hosting will also make future upgrades and improvements to Blackboard easier.
As part of the transition to Blackboard managed hosting, it is important that very large courses on OAK be reduced in size before migration. (Here, size refers to computer storage requirements, not number of students.) There are several thousand courses that will be migrated between now and the end of December, which makes for a tight timeframe. Very large courses take a lot of time to archive from Vanderbilt servers and move to Blackboard servers.
With approval from the OAK Faculty Advisory Board, the transition team has set a target of 1GB for course size reduction. We’ve identified courses that are over this size, and we’re reaching out to faculty associated with those courses to see if the courses can be reduced in size. We recognize that this is an unexpected request of faculty at a busy time of the year and that the technical process of reducing a course size is complicated. Thus, we’ve enlisted a number of support providers (mostly school-based VUIT staff) to help faculty take a look at their courses and see if they can be reduced.
There are a number of reasons a course on OAK might be more than 1GB. Video files, audio files, and even PowerPoint files that are important learning materials can sometimes be very big. We’re not asking faculty to delete such files, although we might work with faculty to move particularly large files to Box during the transition. What we’re mostly looking for is duplicate files and other artifacts created through the various file uploading and course copying tools on OAK. As it turns out, it’s surprisingly easy to create extra files in the system.
When our support providers reach out to faculty with large courses, the first step will be to use tools OAK makes available to see why a particular course is over 1GB. The 1GB number is a target, not a hard limit. If there’s a pedagogical reason to exceed that size, then we’ll make an exception. Our top priority is the teaching needs of faculty. We’re primarily looking for courses we can trim through the elimination of redundant files.
We will reach out to faculty with courses over the 1GB target over the next several weeks, beginning with the older courses that will be migrated to managed hosting. If you’re interested in finding out your course’s size, see the OAK Tips box on this page for instructions. And if you have questions about this process, please contact oak@vanderbilt.edu.