Spotlight on Information Technology
Progress Continues in Virginia Tech’s Blackboard-to-Scholar Transition
Blackboard is being replaced by Scholar and will no longer be available for course use after August 16, 2010. Learning Technologies offers workshops and other transition resources to assist instructional faculty and graduate assistants with the transition throughout the spring and summer. A complete
list of workshops, as well as registration, can be found at www.fdi.vt.edu. Up-to-date information regarding the transition, as well as access to a Blackboard-to -Scholar "Course Copy Tool," can be found at http://learn.vt.edu/transition/. Online Course Systems personnel within Learning Technologies assist with transitioning large sets of question pools for online tests and quizzes (http://4help.vt.edu). As of February 1, 2010, approximately 28 percent of Virginia Tech’s teaching faculty and GTAs were still using Blackboard, while the larger proportion are using Scholar. Scholar is the Virginia Tech version of Sakai, an open-source collaborative learning environment (www.sakaiproject.org).
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Mission
The mission of Virginia Tech's Information Technology organization (IT) is to serve the university community and the citizens of the Commonwealth of Virginia by applying and integrating information resources to:
- Enhance and support instruction, teaching and learning;
- Participate in, support and enhance research;
- Foster outreach, develop partnerships with communities and promote the capabilities of advanced networking and communications;
- Provide, secure, and maintain systems allowing the university to accomplish its missions.
Oversight of the security of university information technology resources and information is entrusted to the Vice President for Information Technology by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors »
The Current Annual Activities Report describes the organization’s accomplishments for the 2008-2009 year.
The computing.vt.edu website provides information on IT services.