Blackboard closes down as university adopts TRACS

Posted by Jayme Blaschke
University News Service
August 24, 2008

Starting this fall semester, TRACS will be the university’s only online learning management system. The university’s transition from Blackboard to TRACS (which is the Texas State brand of the Sakai open source collaborative learning environment) was completed on Aug. 25, 2008 when Blackboard was unplugged.

Texas State began the move to TRACS in 2005, with a small pilot group of faculty. Over the past three years, the TRACS team in Instructional Technologies Support has migrated 1,580 faculty and staff to TRACS from Blackboard. The process was gradual and in addition to programming work, involved thousands of hours of user support in producing documentation, conducting workshops and tutorials, providing phone and email support as well as numerous one-on-one handholding sessions.

Texas State faculty, staff and students guided TRACS development by providing feedback during the move through user surveys and interviews, and have been an important factor in making the transition work.

In addition, the Sakai community which includes universities and colleges across the United States and around the world has supported our transition by providing shared knowledge and wisdom to the TRACS programming and support staff.

For more information on TRACS, please see http://tracsfacts.its.txstate.edu/.