studentcentral moves to Blackboard Managed Hosting

Over the Easter Weekend studentcentral moved from being hosted on site by Information Services staff to Blackboard Managed Hosting.

This move brings many benefits:

• 24 hours a day, seven days a week support from Blackboard’s International network
• Hourly backups and restoration ability
• The ability to patch and upgrade the system much more responsively
• Expert support and configuration for the service

We are currently planning for a major upgrade in July 2014, but the changes this weekend have allowed us to take advantage immediately of some patches, providing:

• The introduction of negative marking.
• A quick navigation to recently accessed courses (details to follow)
• Improved online test resilience

For more information please also see the original post announcing the move to hosting.