Easy Dynamics has recently enjoyed the opportunity to collaborate with the product engineers from Blackboard to deploy their “Learn” learning management software (LMS). Easy Dynamics is partnering with one of our federal law enforcement customers to better utilize online resources for online collaboration.
Blackboard Learn will be an exciting new resource for our customer. Their team is preparing to offer an enhanced collaborative, online training experience for federal law enforcement agencies. Blackboard Learn is a learning management product that provides a customizable Internet-based learning environment with flexible resources to improve the learning experience.
The Beginnings of Standardization
Years ago, each federal law enforcement agency independently trained its own personnel. The training of officers and agents varied greatly and led to inconsistencies and inefficiencies. Eventually, these efforts were consolidated and law enforcement agencies moved towards standardized training and agencies began to coordinate training across common procedures. The Blackboard Learn Environment will greatly enhance that effort by conveniently offering a wealth of learning resources to a broad audience through interactive Internet courses provided through a shared online SharePoint portal.
Who Else Uses Blackboard Learn?
The Blackboard Learn software has been successfully used in educational facilities around the world from public universities to large corporations. The interactive course materials have proven to be very successful in capturing the attention of students and enhancing the learning experience. Many colleges today successfully administer online degrees to the community using this flexible
paradigm that offers opportunities to those who (due to work schedules, family responsibilities or health restraints) would otherwise be denied the benefits of additional education.
Cloud Deployment & Blackboard
Incorporating the Blackboard environment into the Amazon Cloud Production Environment began with establishing the necessary resources to deploy an initial test and development installation. The deployment into a development environment allows our team to gain experience configuring and managing the components prior to a formal testing and implementation.
Virtual Servers 
The development environment consists of virtual cloud servers in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud, which allows for quick and cost effective deployment of resources. Investment in comparable hardware would involve a much larger investment in time and funds. In addition, development on virtual servers allows flexibility and the opportunity to easily adjust the hardware configurations as needed.
Installation
The actual creation and deployment of the servers was a very quick and painless operation. Using stored preconfigured templates of the servers resulted in a rapid deployment without loss of configurable options. Deploying a load balanced solution was a also relatively simple task. So the actual installation of the software only required coordinating a virtual meeting with the interested parties and documenting installation requirements and configuration choices specific to our needs. Walking through the initial configuration options with the Blackboard support engineers was enlightening and helped us understand how to best manage our resources.
Looking into the Future
The Blackboard Learn tool has potential to be a huge asset to federal law enforcement agencies in their goals to consistently train officers and agents in standardized procedures in a very efficient and engaging format. The Easy Dynamics team is excited and looking forward to supporting the transition from the development environment through formal testing and finally to the live online production network.
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