In preparation for the Blackboard 9.1 upgrade in August 2010, UR joined a cohort of other schools planning their upgrades. This cohort helped each other manage the planning, implementation, documentation, training, and troubleshooting of the upgrade. It should be noted that these upgrades cannot be perfect, and complex software will usually have some level of bugs, but the active and open process that is meant to further the tools for teaching and learning while minimizing negative experiences is paramount. To that end, Blackboard corporate posted articles about the usefulness of the cohort program including one about the UR process.
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Blackboard service was restored at 1 AM, about three hours earlier than expected. Please remember that Blackboard is unavailable every morning for approximately 15 minutes somewhere between 3 and 4 AM, and that will happen this morning (Friday, March 11) as well.Please stay tuned for information regarding the bugs that have been patched in this version of Blackboard.If you remain unable to access Blackboard, please try refreshing your web browser, emptying its cache, trying another web browser and/or manually entering the URL (http://blackboard.richmond.edu ) . If none of that works, please try another computer that you are sure has Internet access. Please contact blackboard@richmond.edu if the problem lingers.
The UR Blackboard system will be unavailable for approximately 9 hours beginning Thursday night at 7 PM until Friday morning at 4 AM as Information Services performs maintenance upgrades to the system. The maintenance will fix a number of the issues that some faculty and students are currently experiencing with UR Blackboard. However, it will not add features or change the user interface. Please visit this new site for updates and a list of the updates.
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.
| OS | Browser | |||
| Windows | 60.6% | Firefox | 31.9% | |
| Mac | 36.7% | IE | 29.2% | |
| iPhone | 1.2% | Safari | 26.2% | |
| iPad | 0.5% | Chrome | 12.2% | |
| Android | 0.3% | BlackBerry | 0.2% | |
| Linux | 0.2% | Opera | 0.1% | |
| iPod | 0.2% | RockMelt | 0.1% | |
| BlackBerry | 0.2% | Mozilla | 0.1% |
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.