Category: Information Page 6 of 31

Student Enrollment Removed from Spring 2015 Blackboard Courses July 3

On June 8, 2015

On July 3rd, instructors’ students will be disappearing from last semester’s Blackboard courses. These courses have IDs that begin with 201420_. 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 Workoffline > 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 After you’ve received your confirmation e-mail that the course has been archived (usually within 10-20 minutes), go back to “Export/Archive Course” in your Control Panel.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. Left-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.

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.

If you have questions about UR Blackboard policy, archiving your course, bFree or anything not fully clear to you, please do not hesitate to contact your technology liaison, respond to this e-mail or view the Blackboard policy for faculty on the IS web site: http://is.richmond.edu/academic/blackboard.html.

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

Thank you.

YouTube Changes

By Jon

On May 14, 2015

In Information, Warnings

Due to changes made by YouTube/Google, the YouTube mashup feature is not currently working in Blackboard. The current workaround from Blackboard is as follows:

UPDATE: Blackboard Maintenance Complete

By Jon

On May 9, 2015

In Information

We are happy to announce that our work migrating to the new Blackboard servers is completed 7 hours ahead of schedule! You will notice a few new features in the new system BUT all content and courses have remained as per the project schedule.

If you have any questions or problems, please contact blackboard@richmond.edu for support. This account is monitored seven days a week and someone from the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology will get back with you in a timely manner.

Upcoming Blackboard Changes

By Jon

On April 22, 2015

In Information, Warnings

On Friday, May 8th, we are moving Blackboard to new servers and upgrading the application. In anticipation of that move, we are now in the process of preparing the system. We will announce these changes through SpiderBytes and emails to all faculty and staff. We are aware that undergraduate grades are due by 9 AM on Monday, May 11, and that four summer terms also start on Monday, but this is the best time for this upgrade to take place.

On Wednesday, May 6th we will copy all prior academic courses (2011 to Fall 2014) to the new servers. Faculty will still have access to these courses on the current servers, however any changes made to the older courses will not be reflected on the new servers after May 6th. We will communicate this to faculty and staff in advance. Students do not have access to courses from prior semesters, so they will not notice any changes.

On the morning of Friday, May 8th we will copy all nonacademic courses (courses where enrollment is not through the Registrar) to the new servers during the day. These courses have been set up over the years for committees, student groups, and other administrative functions. Again, faculty, staff, and students will still have access to these courses; but any changes made to the courses will not be reflected on the new servers after the morning of May 8th. We will communicate this in advance.

On the evening of Friday, May 8th at 7 PM, we will shut down Blackboard and move all current semester and any future semester courses to the new servers. We anticipate this outage will last until 1 PM on Saturday, May 9th (typically our maintenance window for Blackboard is from 6 PM Friday nights to 6 AM Saturday mornings). Faculty, students, and staff will not have access to Blackboard during this time. Since the system downtime takes place just at the beginning of graduation weekend, we do not expect there will be a negative impact for system users.

On the afternoon Saturday, May 9th, everyone will be able to access Blackboard as usual along with ALL content. There are some new features available which we will communicate, however the overall interface for Blackboard will not change. Faculty should have no problems navigating and using the upgraded system.

Removing unwanted nonacademic courses off the system will help keep the system running smoothly and reduce the time it will take to perform the upgrade. We also are asking faculty to request removal of unwanted academic courses through the course request system. We will only remove courses at the request of the faculty or staff who created those courses; it is no problem to keep older courses on the system if that is their preference.

UR Blackboard Maintenance Friday March 27th

By Jon

On March 26, 2015

In Information

UPDATE: Blackboard is back online and patched. Please email blackboard@richmond.edu if you have any questions about the system.

Blackboard will be unavailable for an outage March 27th beginning at 10 PM this Friday. This outage is necessary to apply security updates to our servers. Please know the system will not be available between 10PM and 1:00 AM and no changes will be made to course content. If you have any questions or problems, please contact blackboard@richmond.edu.