Overview

The Blackboard DevComm environment enables the development of new contributions to the LMS. Contributions developed through DevComm may be approved for deployment into the production environment. This process and associated governance are still being determined.

Purpose

The environment is a sandbox for developers and instructional support staff to:

Explore Learn 9.1 SP8 functionality
Deploy Building Blocks
Create IMS LTI Providers
Experiment with application configuration (e.g. content & community system)
Training on the Content and Community Systems (until Professional Development environment is available)

Expectations

Do not develop or offer courses.
Do not create users. If someone requires access, please submit a request to connect-admin@it.ubc.ca
Do not change authentication or SSL settings.
Do not change the UBC roles (take a copy if you need to experiment).

Blackboard System Administrator Role

Some participants in the DevComm environment will have the Blackboard System Administrator role. This is the same level of access used by UBC IT administrators in the production environment. Please be mindful of this level of access - there are many people using DevComm and your actions may have an impact on them.

User Management and Authentication

DevComm authenticates against a CWL staging environment using Shibboleth and LDAP. While your CWL may be the same as production, please note that CWL password changes will not apply until the CWL staging environment is refreshed. You may change your password in staging using My Account

If you require CWL accounts for testing, you can create CWL staging account using CWL Sign Up Following account creation, please submit a request to connect-admin@it.ubc.ca to add the account to DevComm.

Environment Refreshes

To ensure that DevComm reflects the configuration of the production environment, the environment will be regularly refreshed to a baseline configuration. Users will be informed in advance of refreshes. A schedule has not been determined at this time. The first refresh likely won't occur until June 2012 given DevComm dependencies and availability of other testing environments.