Page 10

UR Blackboard Maintenance Outage March 21st

On March 20, 2014

UPDATE: Blackboard Patching is completed and the system is operational. Please email blackboard@richmond.edu for any support requests.

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, 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., Friday, March 21. 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.

IE 11 issue with Blackboard

By Jon

On February 14, 2014

In Information, Warnings

Users updating Internet Explorer to version 11 and applying KB2909921 (a security patch for IE 11) will experience a problem using the browser for Blackboard. This seems to affect only Instructors who have “edit mode on” inside a course. The result will be “Internet Explorer is not working….” error message and the browser will shut down.

Our recommendation is to NOT update to IE 11 or KB2909921 at this time. If a user does update and is experiencing a problem with IE crashing, then the recommendation is to use another browser (Firefox or Chrome) when using Blackboard.

Student information Disappears from Fall ’13 courses Feb. 18

By Jon

On February 10, 2014

In Information, Tips, Warnings

On February 18th, instructors’ students will be disappearing from last semester’s Blackboard courses. These courses have IDs that begin with 201310_. 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.

Java Client Update

By Jon

On January 15, 2014

In Warnings

UPDATE 7/14/14: UofR Blackboard is now compatible with the Java 7u51 upgrade for your computer so feel free to update your computer’s Java client to Java 7u51. If there are any issues, please contact us at blackboard@richmond.edu .

Blackboard uses a java client on the user’s computer in order to present information. Java is a product of Oracle Systems which provides routine updates to the java client. The latest update ( Java 7u51) is NOT fully compatible with the University of Richmond’s Blackboard. At this time, we are asking users to NOT upgrade their java client. Blackboard is currently working on a patch which we will implement as soon as possible. We will let the University community know when we have patched the system allowing for updating the java client.

UR Blackboard Maintenance Outage

By Jon

On January 2, 2014

In Information, Warnings

UPDATE: Blackboard is back up and operational. If you have any questions or problems, please contact blackboard@richmond.edu.

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, 5 p.m. to 12 a.m., Friday, January 3. 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.