At 11:00 AM, the Tri-co shutdown its shared instance of the Blackboard course management system. In a two-step process, Swarthmore Professor Aimee Johnson (Math) and Haverford CIO Joe Spadaro pressed the “enter” keys that shut down the Blackboard services for the final time. On a separate screen, the assembled group of onlookers verified that Blackboard was no longer available.

The shutdown is the conclusion to a period of over 11 years where Bryn Mawr, Haverford, and Swarthmore Colleges shared a single instance of Blackboard for all of their students, faculty and staff. All three schools have already switched to Moodle, an open source course management system. Tri-co students continue to have automatic access to their registered courses across all three schools.