Blackboard Home: Additional Site Health and Utilization Reports - 3900.48

Integration, Extension, and Management

Blackboard Home: Additional Site Health and Utilization Reports – 3900.48

Blackboard Learn SaaS
Ultra Experience
Original Experience
Impact: System administrators

Blackboard Home gives administrators insights into how their Learn site is being used. The previous release of Blackboard Home focused on storage usage metrics.

The September release has updates related to site health and utilization. It also helps administrators understand adoption of Ultra Course View.

As before, administrators can see metric changes over time. They can also use the time picker to look at specific timeframes. In this release, there are six new reports.

Unique users. See the count of active unique users over time.
Logins. See the count of user logins over time. Multiple logins by the same user are counted multiple times.
Requests Per Minute. See the average requests per minute served by the Learn application. This reflects the traffic volume (throughput) of the site. Request volume includes traffic from web browsers, mobile apps, and integrated systems.
Application Performance Index (Apdex). This is a measure of the timeliness of the user experience. It is impacted by both the application performance and users’ bandwidth. Apdex is on a scale from 0 to 1. A 0 is an unsatisfactory slow experience; 1 is very fast loading. The apdex measure is a standard managed by an open standards organization. It is meant to act as one indicator of a satisfactory user experience.
Uptime. This report helps administrators identify outages where users were impacted. An outage for this report is defined in the Service Level Agreement.
Ultra adoption. Administrators managing sites with instructor choice for Ultra course adoption need to track adoption and use trends. This report shows the share of active Original and Ultra courses.

Administrators can now switch between viewing different environments. This includes looking at test/stage environments separate from production. Each site will display its deployed version, URLs, deployment location, and information about direct database access (DDA) if enabled.

This functionality will be released in September independently from the 3900.48 release. Details will be shared later on this page.

For administrators: Blackboard Home is only available for Learn SaaS. There are no configurations needed if Blackboard Home was previously enabled. In some environments, it can be necessary to perform the following action to allow access. Go to Administrator Panel > LTI Tool Providers. Find “Blackboard Home” and edit it. Enable “Role in Course” to send role information to Blackboard Home and click submit. Only full system administrators can access Blackboard Home.

Image 1: Course count over time shows the share of courses that are Original, Ultra, Undecided, and in Ultra Preview.