Beachboard
upgrades to a more user-friendly status
By Karla Casillas
Online Forty-Niner
Contributing Writer
Surfing Beachboard is easier now than it was last summer thanks to recent changes.
Over the summer much time and effort was invested into making the site more reliable.
“
It’s a thousand times better than [it was during] spring,” said Instructional
Technology Coordinator Patrick Crispen.
Beachboard was unavailable many times during spring 2005, he said. Since July
1 Beachboard was unavailable for approximately 15 minutes in September.
Beachboard is a popular site for students and faculty. It allows professors to
update class information online and students can view their grades and be linked
to other sites, such as the University Library Web site.
During the spring semester 30,000 students and 1,000 faculty members used Beachboard,
accessing 2,500 courses.
The site’s popularity made it crawl because so many people were using the
site, causing access problems.
Beachboard was connected to one server on campus and could not handle the number
of people who used it. Now, it is connected to five servers, which makes it more
reliable, according to Crispen.
It went from a local server to a hosted server. Blackboard Inc. owns the five
servers Beachboard is connected to. The school pays Blackboard to operate Beachboard,
and they have about a 97 percent rate of the system not being down, according
to Henry Dubois, associate dean of the University Library.
This change makes Beachboard more reliable. If one of the servers goes down,
four others are available to keep
Beachboard working. Before, when the campus server was down, Beachboard was down,
according to Crispen.
Another change to Beachboard was the change of address to https://beachboard.csulb.edu.
According to Crispen, the change was due to a security issue, and now the site
is much safer. The encryption used now is the same used by banks, the government
and MyCSULB.
“
[Beachboard] is safer, faster [and] more reliable,” Crispen said.
Beachboard can also be accessed off-campus. Students and faculty who use it off-campus
should not experience any problems with it unless they are using a dial-up connection,
Dubois said.
Dubois said there are orientations to teach faculty how to use Beachboard. The
faculty who use Beachboard then instruct their students on how to use it for
their class’ needs.
Faculty and students have mixed feelings about Beachboard, but most have experienced
no major difficulties with the site.
Philosophy professor Max Rosenkrantz knew of the changes made, but does not think
they were major.
Rosenkrantz said any problems people experience with Beachboard might not have
anything to do with the site, but with patience.
“
[They] cry about things going slower when it’s OK,” he said.
History professor Lize Sedrez is also satisfied with Beachboard. She said it
works well for her class.
Katiana Payan, a third-year liberal arts major, has used Beachboard this semester
and has no problem with it.
“
The problem may be that [faculty and students] don’t know how to use Beachboard
and that’s why they have problems with it,” she said.
Other students and professors do have a hard time using Beachboard.
Grady Helman, a psychology major, and Lindsey Clemons, a film and electronics
major, have trouble downloading documents.
The documents are there ready to download one minute and gone the next, Helman
said.
Sociology professor Andrew Lohmann does not use Beachboard. He said it is too
frustrating and he just gave up on using it.
“
It’d be great if it was specific about how to activate Beachboard,” he
said. “I had no idea where to go and no time or patience.”
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