With COVID-19 restrictions in place, many institutions have moved to fully on-line instruction leading to a rapid increase in storage requirements and user adoption for many of our clients.
We believe it is our responsibility to assist in this situation and help minimize the educational impact of this disruption. Thus we are implementing some temporary policy changes designed to let you focus on helping your learners and not worry about usage.
Open LMS SaaS
For our Open LMS SaaS clients, if you are within your existing contractual active user counts, we will not charge for temporary active user and storage increases of up to 50% through July 31, 2020. At that point, we’ll reassess the situation and clearly communicate any updates.
Open LMS SaaS clients can review their current active users and storage levels via two simple methods:
- From Behind the Blackboard:
Log in. From the home page, in the top right corner under “What's New for…”, select “Open LMS” and then click the “Users and Storage Data” link.
- From your Open LMS SaaS site:
Select Site Administration, click Blackboard Open LMS then choose Active Enrolled Users.
Please let us know if you want to take advantage of this program by filling out this brief form. This information will help us plan going forward.
Open LMS Enterprise
If you are an Open LMS Enterprise client (primarily in Australia), where you have dedicated cloud allocation, we’d like to work with you to determine how many additional users and how much additional storage you may need to purchase in order to support your communities during the COVID-19 crisis, and we will double that amount for the next year to make sure that you have room to grow. (Example: If you think you will need 6TB of storage and 2000 extra users, we will double that to 12TB and 4000 extra users for a year, for the same price.)
Open LMS Enterprise clients can view their storage numbers:
- View current storage:
You can view current storage by appending /report/coursesize/index.php to your site’s URL.
To discuss storage and user options, please contact your sales rep directly.
We are seeing unprecedented levels of usage and adoption, and the team is proud to be supporting you. We’ll continue to take necessary actions to keep you up and running without interruption.
Brad
This is great, Brad! Those of you out there that might need help navigating Behind the Blackboard for the "User and Storage Data" link, or if you see something in that area that doesn't look correct, please let me know and I can investigate that for you.
Sincerely,
Mike
Great! Are there any plans to expand the resources for simultaneous access? Best regards, Ryoji
Hi Ryoji,
Thank you for your question. What type of expanded resources are you thinking about when it comes to simultaneous access?
Thanks again!
Mike
This is awesome!!!
@Brad R Koch and @Mike Chynoweth
This is really good news and at a great time. Very good to have Open LMS.
I have a question:
After 07/31/2020, will customers have to resume the number of users and contracted storage on your website? How long will they have to do this to have the additional charged in the following month?
Diego,
We are constantly evaluating the situation, and will announce any change in plans as early as possible. Of course, COVID may change the way schools operate and these temporary spikes in usage could become permanent or persist for a much longer period of time. If we decided to change the current plan, we'll give you plenty of time to adjust and will likely offer multiple options for you best manage the increase in adoption and use at your institution.