Dallas College eLearning Operations to Conduct New LMS Survey

As many faculty may recall, in early December 2017, the DCCCD eCampus Blackboard system crashed repeatedly and badly, leading to many faculty to call for accountability and some to call for a new Learning Management System (LMS) vendor to be selected.

The then-faculty Council, with Bill Hammerschlag as president, began collaborating with Chancellor May, Vice Chancellor Lonon, and Chief Innovation Officer Tim Marshall, to prepare DCCCD faculty to lead a process to select a new LMS provider. The Council then developed a comprehensive survey instrument and made it available to faculty in April 2018.

The results of that comprehensive survey were released to the then-Faculty Council on May 27, 2018. Note that this was just four days before four Council members – Bill Hammerschlag (BHC), Matt Henry (RLC), Margo Silva (MVC) and Matt Hinckley (EFC) were succeeded by Scott Sires, Carlos Martinez, Ryan Pettengill, and Stacey Jurhree, respectively. Before the 2018-2019 Council could process and share the results of the survey widely, they had to respond to the initial and flawed report of the Boston Consulting Group. (The 2018-2019 Council, with Shaun Gilligan as president, and the 2019-2020 Council, with Carlos Martinez as president, understandably focused their efforts on rectifying the errors of the initial BCG report, driving toward adoption of the FLRG recommendations though the PIT process, and representing faculty interests in discussions taking place around consolidation into One College.)

Meanwhile, many faculty found that while Blackboard remained cumbersome and fussy, at least it became more reliable and less prone to widespread outages during peak grading periods throughout 2018, 2019, and 2020. As a result, the LMS moved to the “back burner” of the Faculty Council.

For the sake of transparency, the results of the April 2018 DCCFA LMS survey have now been posted on the DCCFA site on SharePoint.

However, even though the LMS has not been on the radar of the Faculty Council since Summer 2018, the shared governance structures that the Faculty Council has created and that have included faculty have been engaged in LMS and related discussions over the past two years.

Specifically, the Instructional Technology User Committee (ITUC), which was created to respond to a need to engage faculty in the identification and implementation of instructional technologies in January 2018, decided later in 2018 to conduct a biennial review of the LMS needs of the DCCCD. That biennial review is due in 2020.

As a result, the new Vice Provost of eLearning, Terry DiPaolo, is developing a new LMS survey for faculty to share their thoughts on the Dallas College LMS. (Note that the 2018 LMS survey results have been shared with Dr. DiPaolo.) Given that many more faculty have had to use Blackboard to a much greater degree both due to the COVID-induced pivot to primarily online instruction and due to accommodating IncludED by pairing publisher LMS environments into eCampus, it is expected that results would be very different compared to the survey conducted in 2018. According to Dr. DiPaolo, we can expect that the new survey can be taken on one’s phone, tablet, or computer, in less than five minutes.

Because the Council believes that LMS selection should by made collaboratively by faculty and other leaders in the instructional operations of Dallas College, the Council urges all faculty – both full time and part time – to complete this new LMS survey when it becomes available.