Category: Warnings Page 9 of 12

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 After you’ve received your confirmation e-mail that the course has been archived (usually within 10-20 minutes), go back to “Export/Archive Course” in your Control Panel.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

Updated: September 15, 2010

Most of these bugs and known product defects Blackboard are minor, but please keep these in mind when contacting your technology liaison for Blackboard support.

1. Send Email

The Send Email screen looks strange in IE8 via the Control Panel. The Submit bar runs through the Attach File link.

Workaround: If this impedes your sending e-mail, send e-mail through the Tools menu item > Send Email.

2. Strange text after setting External Link menu item to open in new window

If you’re going to add an External Link as a menu item, do not set it to open in a new window. If you do, Blackboard adds strange text to it and gives the user a 404 Not Found error when s/he clicks the link.

3. Save as Draft when posting to Discussion Board

When using Save as Draft, you may receive an error and lose your submission. Blackboard has confirmed this is a bug and will be fixed in a future version.

Workaround: Compose your response in a text editor and paste into Blackboard only when you’re ready to submit.

4. Tasks appearing in arbitrary order

Ideally, tasks would appear in a student’s Tasks module in order of priority and due date. However, they only appear this way on the My Blackboard page; in the Home Page they appear in an arbitrary order. Blackboard has also confirmed this bug, which will be fixed in a future version.

Workaround: If you use Tasks, be mindful of this and tell your students they may not appear in order of date due. If you’re using Tasks but not Announcements, consider creating a Tasks tool link in your course menu and setting Tasks to your course entry point. From the Tasks tool link, students can sort tasks by Title, Priority or Due Date.