Author: Jon Page 15 of 24

UPDATE: UR Blackboard Maintenance COMPLETED

On March 10, 2012

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.

MS Office prompts for authentication

By Jon

On January 12, 2012

In Information, Warnings

Issue

When you try to open a Microsoft (MS) Office 2007/8 document in Blackboard while using MS Internet Explorer 8 browser, you may be prompted for authentication although you have a valid session in Blackboard. UPDATE: This remains to be an issue with Office 2010/11 documents as well.

Solution

UPDATE: The best solution is to hit the Escape key from the window that asks for your credentials.

Another solution is to use a different web browser such as Firefox (http://www.mozilla.com) or Safari which are not affected by this particular issue.

In IE 8 and 9: instead of clicking the link to the file and opening it directly into the web browser, you can right-click on the document link and “Save Target As…” to download the document to your computer. Then you can open the document from the download folder without issue.

Originally published September 3, 2011, 14:35

Finalizing Fall Teaching

By Jon

On December 13, 2011

In Information, Tips

It’s been a great semester! Your students were at the top of their game, and you were at the top of yours. Now for the winter break.

Now is the perfect time to consider the role of technology in your courses. The first question you might consider is how are you using technology currently? Do you use Blackboard, email, netfiles or PowerPoint? If so, how are you using those technologies?
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Blackboard is a great space to consolidate class handouts, syllabi and other files that need to be distributed to your students. BUT did you know it can do so much more? Blackboard allows the instructor to create assignments that students upload directly into Blackboard Grade Center, where the instructor can download all the files at one time. You also can use multiple choice, true/false, and multiple answer quizzes and test as an assessment of student knowledge which can be graded by the system. The instant feedback provided to the student increases student knowledge and provides a foundation for future learning.

There is another feature in Blackboard that as faculty, you will want to know about. The feature displays student photographs for the students in your course. This is a great way to associate a face with a name and can really speed up the first day of class.

Blackboard also has features that you might want to explore for the fall such as discussion board, groups, wikis, and blogs. These technologies allow you to introduce outside classroom discussion to the course, collaboration and reflection to generate higher order cognitive skills. If you would like to know about these technologies within Blackboard, please contact your liaison.

As you prepare for the spring semester, contact your liaison to discuss how technology can support your class objectives. The Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology is here to help you consider the best technological tool to support your pedagogical needs.

A few tips: consider archiving your course as soon as possible. If you are not sure how, read click here.

This is a great time to download your Grade Center so that you can have an easy-to-get-to record of student work in your course. Remember, all students are removed from your course 60 days from the end of the semester. Also, if you are using the discussion board, consider making an archive of those responses as well.

We hope you had a wonderful semester and we look forward to working with you in the spring!

Students disappear from Summer ’11 Blackboard courses October 14!

By Jon

On October 6, 2011

In Information, Warnings

On October 14, instructors’ students will be disappearing from last semester’s Blackboard courses. These courses have IDs that begin with 2010_30. 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 Manage > 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. Right-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. Note: Courses older than 60 days created after Fall 2008 will not have student names attached to discussion-board postings. (Pre-Fall 2008 Courses should have student names attached to discussion board postings; if you need to save them, you can collect and print them in the same way.)

If you have any questions, please send an email to blackboard@richmond.edu .

Thank you.

Reported Blackboard Issues

By Jon

On October 5, 2011

In Information

Yesterday evening faculty and students reported problems with the Blackboard system. Although Blackboard appears to be operating normally at this time, Information Systems is looking into the cause of this service disruption. We appreciate your patience as we conduct our investigation and ask you to contact blackboard@richmond.edu if you need any assistance or to report a problem with Blackboard.