Author: Fred Page 4 of 10

If you are interested in what browsers and operating systems the UR community is using to access Blackboard, here is the breakdown over the last week.

Interestingly, Apple mobile devices account for 2% of the UR Blackboard accesses and 80% of all mobile device accesses.More importantly from a support standpoint, we see that about 20% of the community use browsers that are not Blackboard-supported.  That is, Safari for Windows, Chrome, and those listed below Chrome are not officially compatible and supported for Blackboard.  We hope they work for people, but we recommend that people use Firefox because it has the least number of known issues with Blackboard.  Also, 5% of the community use browsers that are not Java enabled.  Technically, Java is not required, but it causes much poorer performance for people when using features that can take advantage of Java, e.g., editing text in a discussion board posting or assignment.Please check the UR Blackboard support page and then contact blackboard@richmond.edu if you have any questions.

Information Services restored access to course files by approximately 8pm.  If you cannot access your course files, please try using the Firefox browser as a diagnostic and try emptying your browser’s cache.  If you still do not have access, please contact us at blackboard@richmond.edu with (a) your netid, (b) your affected course (if possible, please give the CRN which is the 5-digit number starting with a “2” that comes after 201020_ in the upper, left-hand portion of the course in Blackboard), and (c) the particular path that you would take in the course menu to get to the file in question.We thank you for your patience.

Information Services is aware of a problem Sunday evening in which Blackboard users cannot upload or download files from courses.  We are troubleshooting the problem.  For time critical file needs, the best option is to use other means for delivering files such as email.  We hope to have a solution tonight, however.  Please visit this news site (http://blog.richmond.edu/blackboard/ ) for updates.

Blackboard is again up.  If you still see a message when browsing to blackboard.richmond.edu, please force your browser to refresh, restart your browser, try a different browser temporarily, or try another computer temporarily. Contact us at blackboard@richmond.edu for assistance.

Selecting Youtube from the Build Content feature is currently resulting in an error.  This was caused by a change in the way Youtube has structured it’s integration tools, and Blackboard has not yet responded with a fix.Instructors have two choices for workarounds:

Basic Option:

1. Go to a YouTube and find the video you want to place in your course.
2. Copy the URL and paste it into the Content area you want students to access.

Better but lengthier option: Embedding a YouTube video directly in the Text Editor:

1. Access the YouTube video you wish to embed.
2. Copy the Embed Code found underneath the video and select the box Use old embed code. You must select Use old embed code in order to avoid visual display problems in your course.
3. Go to Blackboard and select Build Content > Create Item.
4. Type in the name of the video and click the HTML source mode “<>” in the text editor.
5. Paste in the embed code and click submit.