You will notice a new look when you log into Blackboard! There is a new screen that will come up for you only once and looks like the image below.
As the semester ends and thoughts turn to summer research projects, now is a great time to close out your Blackboard course because on July 3, instructors’ students will be disappearing from Spring 2013 semester’s Blackboard courses. These courses have IDs that begin with 201220_. 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 are not familiar with Atomic Learning, it is the online video training services provider for the University of Richmond. There are hundreds of applications in their inventory, often spanning multiple versions of the application and for both Windows and Mac users. Applications include but are not limited to Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Acrobat, InDesign, etc.), Blackboard, iPod Touch, and Windows and Mac OS. Tutorials are broken up into short (1-4 minute long) video tutorials that you can watch using Flash or QuickTime formats. Users can pause, rewind, or navigate easily between video clips. You can access the system outside of Blackboard by going to http://is.richmond.edu/training/tutorials.html.
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 upgrade, 5 p.m.-6 a.m., Friday, May 17. The user interface will not change and all course content will still be available after the work is completed. 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 at http://blog.richmond.edu/blackboard.
UPDATE: Blackboard was successfully patched and is functioning normally. If you experience any problems, please email blackboard DOT richmond DOT edu.
The system maintenance was completed and the system is again available. Please remember the user option of using the wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) text editor is now a required feature because if this is turned off, people are not able to access necessary services within the application. If you have questions or experience any issues regarding this particular change, please contact blackboard@richmond.edu.
We regret that the outage was longer than expected, and we appreciate your patience.