With the recent prob­lems FerrisConnect has been expe­ri­enc­ing, some stu­dents are con­cerned about being able to com­plete their assignments.

On the FerrisConnect home­page, a progress report regard­ing tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties was posted with a mes­sage from Provost Fritz Erickson. The progress report stated that Ferris has expe­ri­enced sev­eral chal­lenges asso­ci­ated with the FerrisConnect learn­ing platform.

FSU Information Technology Services staff and Blackboard, the ser­vice asso­ci­ated with the FerrisConnect sys­tem, have been work­ing together to solve the prob­lems that began in the fall.

One expla­na­tion for the prob­lems is an issue described as “per­sis­tent users,” or users who do not log out of the sys­tem. Roberta Teahen, asso­ciate provost, said she does not think the stu­dents are per­sis­tent users, it’s the server that does not log them out.

She said that FerrisConnect has mul­ti­ple servers and when­ever users do not log out of the sys­tem, the server becomes over­loaded and shuts down.

Kayla Konway, tech­ni­cal and pro­fes­sional com­mu­ni­ca­tion stu­dent, said, “It’ll kick me off after a few min­utes and when I go on Blackboard, it takes for­ever to load.”

Konway feels that if FerrisConnect is down and stu­dents can­not sub­mit their assign­ments, it should not count against them.

Graphic design stu­dent Ashley Felt also shared a sim­i­lar view with Konway.

She said, “The prob­lems with FerrisConnect are ridicu­lous. A lot of stu­dents have classes where the pro­fes­sors have quizzes and tests for you to take on there and they have deadlines…how are peo­ple sup­posed to take them if they can’t get on there?”

Felt also said, “Why should we be pun­ished by our grades being low­ered if it’s not our fault?”

Teahen said the IT team has been work­ing with the Blackboard tech­ni­cal peo­ple for months to solve the prob­lem and iden­tify par­tic­u­lar things that might be prompt­ing this to happen.

“We are told by Blackboard that they are aggres­sively work­ing on it,” said Teahen.

Blackboard Inc. Senior Vice President Craig Chanoff sub­mit­ted a let­ter to the fac­ulty and stu­dents of Ferris apol­o­giz­ing for the chal­lenges some have expe­ri­enced access­ing the FerrisConnect system.

The let­ter states the engi­neers at Blackboard are work­ing closely with the tech­ni­cal staff at Ferris to trou­bleshoot the prob­lem and deter­mine how it can be resolved as quickly as possible.

“It isn’t solved yet,” said Teahen of the on-going issues.

IT Director John Urbanick and e-learning Administrator Mary Holmes have taken the lead on fix­ing the prob­lem. She said Urbanick has con­ducted many con­fer­ence calls with Blackboard.

Both Holmes and Urbanick could not be reached for com­ment prior to deadline.

“Our great­est con­cern is we do not want courses dis­rupted for fac­ulty or stu­dents,” said Teahen.

She said the IT team and oth­ers focused on fix­ing the prob­lem have decided that they could not wait for the Blackboard solu­tion and have pur­chased and will be adding two addi­tional servers.

“We had to do some­thing to make sure our stu­dents aren’t impaired,” said Teahen.