UR Blackboard

On February 19, instructors’ students will be disappearing from last semester’s Blackboard courses. These courses have IDs that begin with 201210_.  So if you are an instructor using Blackboard and haven’t gotten around to archiving your courses and you want to keep a record of your students’ grades and discussion board interactions, now is the time to archive your course, download your Grade Center as an Excel file, and/or collect your discussion board discussions.Other than student interactions and grades, all materials will remain in your course until you request its removal or three years has passed (whichever comes first). To download your grades, in Grade Center go to Workoffline > Download and save the full Grade Center. On the next screen, be sure to hit Download instead of OK. Continue reading ‘Students disappear from Fall ’12 Blackboard courses Feb 19!’

–PLEASE READ–

Blackboard is dependent on Java for file uploading, chat and virtual classroom.  There is a known issue with Java 7 that Information Services is aware of and working towards a solution. You can read more about that at the IS website.  Our recommendation is for everyone using Blackboard to stay on their current version of Java, DO NOT upgrade at this time, and DO NOT disable Java if you use any of the above-mentioned features.  When Information Services has a solution, we will update this blog site with that information.

For now, Windows users who are already running Java, version 7, the Help Desk is in the process of identifying those machines, and will be contacting those users directly, and providing them with instructions for correcting this current vulnerability.

For Mac users, our current recommendation is not to attempt to apply any updates or patches to Java.

If you have any questions regarding this issue, please contact the UR Help Desk at 287-6400 or helpdesk@richmond.edu.

If you are experiencing a problem with “Invalid File Links” in your course, please contact your CTLT liaison, email blackboard@richmond.edu or call 287-6860 for support. We will get you back up and running as soon as we can!

On July 3, instructors’ students will be disappearing from last semester’s Blackboard courses. These courses have IDs that begin with 201120_.  So if you are an instructor using Blackboard and haven’t gotten around to archiving your courses and you want to keep a record of your students’ grades and discussion board interactions, now is the time to archive your course, download your Grade Center as an Excel file, and/or collect your discussion board discussions.Other than student interactions and grades, all materials will remain in your course until you request its removal or three years has passed (whichever comes first). To download your grades, in Grade Center go to Workoffline > Download and save the full Grade Center. On the next screen, be sure to hit Download instead of OK.

If you would like to keep an archive of the course, follow these instructions:

1. Go to your course’s Control Panel and select “Packages and Utilities” and then “Export/Archive Course”

2. Click the “Archive” button, select options, and hit “Submit.”

3. After you’ve received your confirmation e-mail that the course has been archived (usually within 10-20 minutes), go back to “Export/Archive Course” in your Control Panel.

4. Left-click the archived .zip file and save it to your desktop.

An archive .zip file contains the course content in a format that is not directly readable.  However, if you’d like to view the contents of your archived course, download bFree, a free Blackboard course extractor created by the University of North Carolina: http://its2.unc.edu/tl/tli/bFree/.

If you would like to archive discussion board postings, go to your course’s Discussion Board and select all posts you would like to keep. Select “Collect” and then “Print Preview”. To save them digitally, print to PDF; you can also print hard copies.

If you have questions about UR Blackboard policy, archiving your course, bFree or anything not fully clear to you, please do not hesitate to contact your technology liaison, respond to this e-mail or view the Blackboard policy for faculty on the IS web site: http://is.richmond.edu/academic/blackboard.html.

If you have any questions for the CTLT liaisons, please contact your CTLT liaison or send an email to blackboard@richmond.edu .

Thank you.

Update – the patching has been completed ahead of schedule, and UR Blackboard is again available.

In order to install patches and maintenance software on the UR Blackboard servers yet minimize impact on usage, the system will be unavailable during an early morning upgrade on Friday, March 9, 10 pm – 6 am.  The user interface will not change and all course content will still be available after the work.  Please schedule your UR Blackboard usage accordingly and contact us at blackboard@richmond.edu with any questions or concerns. Continue to check this Blackboard News site for additional information concerning this outage.