BbWorld17 – DevCon – Monday 24th – Tuesday 25th July 2017

Usual legal statement about everything discussed has the potential to change and not come to market etc. etc.

Knowledge bar has been expanded this year. UX lab – user experience – come and discuss your experiences and how Bb can help.

Mobile app should have every bit of information you need about the conference.

#BbWorld17

Thanks to sponsors Amazon WebServices + Amazon Alexa

Tim Tomlinson 

CPO

Produce Excellence & Quality

Bb hear from us quality is our top priority. This is most important in Learn. In the last year, 100’s of bugs fixed, updated technology and simplified releases. 

New rating system this year:

Bb have invested in a lot of automated build and test to try and make sure releases are simple and bug free. Almost 600% increase in fix requests delivered. BUT this increased install times. the Q2 2017 release down by 1/3 and runtime is down by about 20%. Bb are continuing to work on improvements to the installer.

Average time to resolution down to 6.5 days for critical issues. New test automation technology and higher coverage is supporting this.

203 clients on SaaS, 68 underway and 52 evaluations / pilots.

Innovation

1. Learn
1. (The backbone)
2. Experience
1. Original
2. Ultra
3. Deployments
1. Self Hosted
2. Managed Hosted
3. SaaS

Bb Developer portal allows developers to access key information and dev versions of Bb.

Bb are working on providing a bigger / longer look into the Bb roadmap. With greater visibility comes more chance of change as development progresses.

Accountability

We were shown what was promised last year and that Bb have done it – anything not mentioned I guess comes under the legal statement above lol. In my opinion they have delivered on last year’s announcements. Bb admin communication could have been a little better this year and they are devoted to improving this again.

Announcing a free no cost licensing option for developers. Entry level to community.

DevCon: Architectural modularity and adaptability with Blackboard Mobile products

Henry Lee, Hubert He, Qing Xu

All communications via HTTPS for secure communication.

Modularity

 – the way for Bb to make their products more usable and enable Bb to be more responsive to development and support.

Drawer Menu
Base navigation panel for native apps gives the user a consistent way of accessing other functional spaces.

Courses
Allows users to view their courses for the past, current and future semesters

Course Overview
This module allows the user to quickly navigate sections within the course.

Widgits

Bb now have the ability to reuse these widgets into other modules.

Product Adaptability

Module Repository
Modules in this repository can be shared across all products, they are all based on Bb design and technical standard.

Blackboard Instructor
Based on standard modules and added some instructor specialised customisation, can be independently distributed into the market.

Blackboard
Based on standard modules and added some specialised customisation, can be independently distributed into the market.

Reusability

Reliability

Independent Modules > Unit Testing – this guarantees quality of the system – > Continuous Integration Testing – this makes sure all of the modules developed work well with each other – > Manual/Automation Testing – last defence and final testing to make sure nothing has been missed.

Live demonstration of the modules being pulled into the app development and how they work.

DevCon: Going Splunking: Using Splunk for server log analytics in Blackboard Learn

When you get an error emailed to you, you usually try and look in the log files. But there are many log files with different formats and it can be very hard to dig your way through them.

Splunk is Google for Logfiles.

Schema on the fly
Splunk will:

• Collect and index data
• search, analyse and visualise
• Monitor, alert and report.

Forwarders can be placed directly on your data sources to send your data to splunk
Indexer goes through your data and transforms the raw data into events and stores the events in an index.

Managed and self-hosted Bb Environments

Not sure about SaaS – Offering ELK (Elasticsearch, LogStash and Kibana)

Alternatives to Splunk
SCOM
Nagios
ELK

Blog: http://bbadmin.uark.edu/

Demonstration of how this can be used to query student claims of submitting but no result etc.:

Simple way to visualise the activity when filtering on the student ID and PK1 value of the quiz.

Recently there is now a log file entry to show when a file is attached to an assignment submission.
This allows you to check if the student did or did not attach a file with their submission.

getSafeFileName is the search term to look for file attachment.

Philips Hue lights can be controlled by splunk analysis. i.e. have a light turn on if there is an issue 🙂

DevCon: Machine Learning: Past, Present, and Future

Hilary Mason, Fast Forward Labs

In 1880 it took 7 years to count everyone who lived in the USA. Someone developed a machine for simply counting the US census.

This machine used punch cards and this lead into the creation of IBM where these cards were used into the 1900’s.

These days we have a change in our language where we now refer to software as though it were a person.  People refer to an AI as “The AI” and even how they can get it to be their BFF.

In the 1960’s they felt that within 10 years we would have a solution that can translate natural language.

In 1952 Bell Labs were able to develop a mechanical ‘mouse’ that could solve its way through a maze and learn as it went so as to inform future path decisions.

In 2017 we are not doing anything new, but it is now so cheap and fast we can handle a lot more data in a shorter time.

Currently we are able to develop a computer user interface which is the same as the user interface we use between humans – speech.

Data Science is going from “How many people signed up for my course” to “How many are likely to sign up next semester”.

• Big Data
• Analytics & BI
• Product data science
• R&D

Data science is a new professional role.

Data Science is a team sport!

We are augmenting human capabilities not replacing humans.

Intuition and data – it’s not one or the other

Fast Forward Labs

Natural Language Generation – going from data to naturally sounding sentences. This has been demonstrated on real estate listing creation.

The real impact will be in making complex data simple.

Deep learning for rich images is something a lot of people have their eye on.

This can go wrong – example: algorithm learnt that anything that looked like fries next to water was a crab so a burger restaurant’s images had some listed as “Crabs” when they do not sell crabs and there were none in the image.

Most machine learning is done within black boxes – i.e. you can see what is going on or why but we need to know what is going on and we need to understand them.

DevCon: IMS Caliper: Crossing the event streams

IMS Global learning standards body creating standards such as LTI and Caliper.  This allows for Learning ecosystems without vendor lock in.

IMS provide standard implementations of the Caliper Sensor on GitHub and also the Event Store Implementation on GitHub.

Using Caliper with Bb

Self-Hosted Learn support – planned from Fall 2017 – same outbound as MH/SaaS

What is included?

• AssessmentEvent
• Starting or submitting an assignment
• In Ultra, includes Assignment activity
• AssessmentItemEvent
• Saving a question Event
• AssignableEvent
• Starting or submitting an assignment

Question asked about inbound for Self-Hosted – is the roadmap planned? Not yet as it isn’t yet on Managed hosted. It is being considered and issues resolved.

DevCon: Accessibility: Common coding mistakes developers make using ARIA