The Office of Information Technology and Academic Technology and Distributed Learning are pleased to share with you two projects our teams have been collaborating on over the past several months: a revamping of our university’s information portal, MySJU, and an enhancement to our Learning Management System (LMS), Blackboard.

Beginning in March, we gathered representatives from all areas of the university to discuss ways to enhance our portal and make it a more useful tool for all campus constituents. At the same time, a faculty-led task force reviewed a number of potential tools that would meet the assessment needs of the Education department in the College of Arts & Sciences, the Haub School of Business, and the General Education Program (GEP), ultimately selecting Blackboard’s Outcomes module. Based on your feedback and the task force’s selection, we have moved full-swing into the process of implementing these new systems.

We believe that these new tools, which will be available later this academic year, will provide you quicker, easier access to the information, online services, and collaboration tools you need to fulfill your role at SJU.

Here are a few of the new features we think you will find useful in the new portal system:

• a personalized experience, giving you the information you need based on your role at the university,

• a better, more effective means to communicate, collaborate, and share information with the SJU community, and

• anytime, anywhere access to the portal via mobile devices.

In addition to the assessment tools that are vital to the Haub School of Business and the Education department, all faculty will benefit from the following new features:

• new content management tools to promote sharing of learning objects across courses,

• an improved content editor that vastly improves your ability to format text and paste content from Microsoft Word along with an improved equation editor,

• inline grading, so faculty no longer have to download assignments to their computer then upload them back to Blackboard (check out an overview at http://youtu.be/3X9Rerz0VX0), and

• a new retention center to help faculty members identify at-risk students before it’s too late for the student (check out an overview at http://youtu.be/_bnSHI3qLik).

Over the coming months, we will be reaching out to you for additional feedback as well as providing continuous updates on these projects.  You can expect regular communication detailing the new features, what benefits will be available for students, faculty, and staff, and the schedule for completing the projects and making the new systems available to the community.

At this time, we are still in the installation stage for both systems, but expect to begin testing the new LMS later this semester and the portal shortly thereafter.  Training opportunities will be offered for both systems as well, both during and after the testing phases.  Then in the Spring, both systems will be available in a limited pilot to work out any remaining issues, with the plan to fully launch both systems this coming summer.

We have created this blog to facilitate broader discussion around the projects and features that you want to see.  The blog is available to all members of the university at and we are committed to including all communication and documentation for these projects as we progress so you can see exactly where they stand.

If you have any questions about either of these projects, please visit our blog.  We are monitoring questions and comments at this location, and welcome any feedback!