Category: Information Page 18 of 31

Students disappear from Summer ’11 Blackboard courses October 14!

On October 6, 2011

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 After you’ve received your confirmation e-mail that the course has been archived (usually within 10-20 minutes), go back to “Export/Archive Course” in your Control Panel.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

Can’t See Discussion Board Posts?

By Fred

On September 16, 2011

In Information

If you do not see discussion board posts while others can, you may have inadvertently flipped your settings to hide them. The best way to solve the problem is the following:
(1) go to the Discussion Board in the course
(2) select any forum
(3) In the tannish area, mouse over the button for Display and select Show All (you should now see all the posts).

Another workaround is to go to the Discussion Board page, itself, and notice that that there is a column of unread posts in each forum and each number actually contains hyperlinks that will take you directly to the posts – and that link will show the posts regardless of what display setting was selected previously.

PDF Problems with Firefox 5 and Safari 5 on Macs

By Fred

On August 6, 2011

In Information

Recent versions of both Safari (ver 5) and Firefox (ver 5) for the Mac are unable to display PDF files when set to display in a subframe within the browser window (such as done in Blackboard content areas). The problem does not affect blackboard items where the PDF file appears as an ordinary attachment (such as in a wiki or discussion board).

Faculty: File items in a content area display as a page icon and the name of the file as a hyperlink. If you use such File items, please go to the content area where they appear, and for each one use its contextual menu (double chevrons) to edit it. Make sure that you set "Open in New Window: Yes" (the default is "no"). Without this fix, you and your students using Safari 5 or Firefox 5 will not be able to access PDFs correctly.

Need to Request a Course?

By Jon

On August 5, 2011

In Information

For faculty choosing to use Blackboard with their academic courses, a new Blackboard course must be requested each semester. To request a Blackboard course, please follow these few steps.

Go to http://blackboard.richmond.edu and look to the right of the log-in screen. You will see a link to “Faculty Blackboard New Course Request”. Click on that link.

On the next screen, log into Blackboard with your NetID and Password. You will see a slight change on the page which is indicated by the circled area in the image below.

On the next screen, you will notice your name at the top followed by options to request academic, non-academic or removal of courses.

Follow the prompts to request an academic course. It normally will take 6-12 hours for the system to create and populate your new Blackboard courses.

If you need further assistance, we are having Blackboard training on Aug. 11 at 10:30 and August 23 at 1:30. You can sign-up for these workshops at http://cygnet.richmond.edu/events/fall2011workshops.