Note: Advanced planning is especially important because the downtime will occur a few days after the end of the Fall semester (December 21st), and just prior to the beginning of the January Intersession (January 2nd). We recommend that faculty and students do their best to submit necessary work before the scheduled migration begins, or they will need to wait until after the migration has been completed. In addition, any instructors teaching during the January intersession should consider this maintenance timeframe as they prepare for their courses
Why is This Occurring: Migrating Blackboard Learn to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) environment will allow for future system updates, fixes and improvements to be performed quickly and seamlessly, with zero downtime. Pace University, along with our peer institutions is moving to a new continuous delivery model for Blackboard which avoids future planned outages for upgrades, and provides timely access to the most current versions of the Blackboard applications. This period for the upgrade has been selected as it is historically the period with the least usage throughout the calendar year. We recognize this will be inconvenient for some users and would like to apologize in advance. Our expectations are that this will avoid disruptions during future upgrades.