Author: Fred Page 6 of 10

There was an unplanned Blackboard outage for about 15 minutes beginning just before 10AM today.  The system is back up, and Information Services is monitoring and studying the system and the event.  If you have any unique observations or concerns or questions, please contact blackboard@richmond.edu .

Thank you for your patience.

UPDATE: The outage was cause by a hardware failure.  Information Services engaged redundant equipment to bring the server back up.  A planned outage in the near future will be required to replace the affected equipment and return the system to the regular level of system redundancy.  Although it will be scheduled to minimize impact, we realize there is no perfect time this close to the end of the semester. Please keep an eye out for announcements of the installation outage.

If you are an instructor giving online assessments in Blackboard, you are probably aware of a problem in which creating a test requires you to go to “Add Interactive Tool” instead of the more obvious, “Create Assessment.” This problem has been fixed (see screen capture below)so you will now follow these first few steps to create or deploy a test:

1. Go to the preferred content area for deploying the assessment.
2. Mouse over the Create Assessment button.
3. Select Test from the menu.

If you can log onto UR Blackboard and can get to your course but cannot seem to find a way to “move around” (navigate) within your course, maybe you have inadvertently hidden the course menu (see screen capture below).

You might not see the “Home Page” because some courses have it set up to bring students to some other page when accessing the course.  The main thing to notice is that there is no course menu (set of navigation buttons) on the left side.  To make the course menu reappear, look for the right-facing arrow on the far left side of the browser window in the dark blue area) and click it to toggle the course menu to reappear.  You should then see the course menu (see figure below).

The following is an announcement from Blackboard, Inc.

Since its launch in 2000, the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program aims to help faculty use e-Learning technology more effectively by identifying and disseminating best practices for designing engaging online courses.  Using a rubric, instructors and course designers are able to evaluate how well their own course conforms to best practices for Course Design, Interaction & Collaboration, Assessment and Learner Support.

Please consider participating in the 2011 Exemplary Course Program by submitting a course of your own or volunteering to be a reviewer or both!  The deadline for nominating your course for review is January 18, 2011. Feel free to forward this message on to faculty or instructional designers you think would benefit from participating in this program.

There are many benefits to participating in the Exemplary Course Program:

• Learn course design best practices to improve the engagement, collaboration, assessment and learner support within your own courses
• Develop a fresh perspective by seeing how other instructors and designers from your discipline or area of interest are developing their courses
• Apply lessons learned from the Exemplary Course Rubric to your own courses or those you are helping to develop
• Receive detailed feedback on your own course development on the best practices you are employing or areas in which it can be improved
• Gain professional development experience and recognition for your accomplishments and participation in the program

This is a valuable learning experience for even the most seasoned instructor or designer.

To learn more about the 2011 Exemplary Course Program visit www.blackboard.com/ecp where you will find information on how to:

• Volunteer to be a reviewer
• Download the Exemplary Course Rubric and Submit a Course for consideration
• Explore best practices and past winning courses
• Learn about how to participate in the 2011 Exemplary Course Program

We hope that you will be participating in this year’s Exemplary Course Program. If you have any questions please send an email to ecp@blackboard.com.

Best Regards,
The Client Success Team

For the last year, Blackboard has supported a new feature for people accessing the system via Apple devices like the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad using wi-fi (by wi-fi, not by cellular connection) and by Sprint Android (only by Sprint network, not by wi-fi).  We occasionally get reports from members of the UR community that opening the application on their devices returns a message that the University of Richmond has not enabled the service.  This is not true as we first enabled this service Spring 2010 and have not made any changes.  When trying to access UR Blackboard through Blackboard Mobile learn app, mobile devices actually go through a corporate Blackboard server before accessing our UR servers.  As best as we can tell, there are two frequent causes of the aforementioned error:

(1) Blackboard seems to frequently update the mobile device apps and the recently outdated version often loses compatibility.

(2) Blackboard’s servers temporarily lose the ability to mediate the connection between the mobile device and the person’s institution’s Blackboard.

To best minimize these issues, people who want to use their mobile devices with UR Blackboard need to keep their Blackboard Mobile Learn applications as frequently updated as possible, and they should have a contingency such as using their device’s web browser with UR Blackboard if that is practical.