Senior IT Student s Capstone Project Betters UC s Blackboard Experience, Wins IT Expo

Greg Lloyd fell in love with computers at a young age.

After he saw his uncle open a computer, Lloyd decided he wanted to work with them one day.

He enrolled in the University of Cincinnati’s School of Information Technology within the College of Education, Criminal Justice & Human Services to pursue a degree in IT. While enrolled, Lloyd gained real-world experience through working at UCIT – where he has been for two years.

Currently, he is a part-time student and full-time UCIT employee, where he acts as team lead for Enterprise eLearning Applications.

Lloyd and his team have a responsibility that impacts nearly every student and faculty member at UC – to make sure UC’s Blackboard system stays up and running. Blackboard is at the heart of the university’s eLearning ecosystem as students and faculty visit it daily, sometimes multiple times.

Course documents, homework, grades, syllabi – everything you need to know about your class is usually posted on Blackboard. Some faculty members even use the system for online class discussions, quizzes and tests. 

With so many people at the university depending on Blackboard, it’s important to establish a strategic way to find and solve potential issues before they become big problems.

Which is exactly what Lloyd sought to accomplish with his capstone project.

At the 2015 IT Expo, Lloyd presented his Blackboard Open Source Monitoring project and won the Virtualization and System Administration category. His project focused on bettering UCIT’s Blackboard monitoring solution, so administrators can find and prevent potential issues.

“The idea is to ensure the highest uptime that we possibly can,” Lloyd said. “I have been able to learn from prior incidents and identify some precursors of what could have caused those issues.”

One of two issues usually causes problems for end users when utilizing Blackboard: blocked threads or too many database connections – which can happen in multiple scenarios. 

To students and faculty, these problems just reveal themselves as page freezes and slow load times, but to administrators they are threats that can cause much larger issues if they are not detected quickly 

“There are so many different things that can go awry in technology in general, that it’s rarely 'this then that,'" Lloyd said. “Overall, this project has allowed administrators to see when systems are starting to be negatively impacted, and they are able to take precautionary actions before students are affected.”

Blackboard availability has improved dramatically since administrators implemented Lloyd’s project. This semester, UC’s Blackboard team has been able to avoid downtime due to the monitoring metrics implemented during the project, according to Lloyd. 

Before implementing Lloyd’s project, administrators could see when problems were arising, but they had difficulty staying ahead of them. 

“The Blackboard system has changed over the years and the monitoring solution that we used to tell us when problems were arising didn’t really change with it,” Lloyd said. “It needed a drastic overhaul since the university is more reliant on online learning.”