Blackboard News

The Blackboard system experienced intermittent problems from about 4 am until 5:20 am on Tuesday morning 5/13, followed by a period when it was completely unavailable from 5:20 until 6 am. Problems appear to have been due to a failed backbone network switch, and were resolved by UO Network Services.

The maintenance for Blackboard is completed. We were able to install the update without restarting the system.

A problem has been found in the hotfix that we had planned to install this Saturday we will not be installing it this Saturday as originally planned. We will still be installing a Building block update instead.

Blackboard will still be running during this time but there is a chance that we will need to do a quick system restart sometime between 8:00am and 9:00am. If this is needed the system will only be unavailable for 2-3 minutes.

The UO Libraries department that manages the Blackboard system has a new name. We’re now “Scholarly Communications and Instructional Support,” or SCIS for short. Blackboard users shouldn’t expect any substantial changes apart from the name, though — we’ll still be providing the same support you expect for the Blackboard system. We expect that about 3/4 of all student credit hours will continue to be in courses with a Blackboard component. You can still file trouble tickets or ask questions by sending email to courseinfo@blackboard.uoregon.edu. Instructors can still get training and assistance by visiting SCIS Consulting, Room 19 Knight Library, or calling 346-1942.

Longer term, the change in department name reflects a committment to supporting the intersection of — and synergies between — teaching and research. Students read textbooks and attend classes, but they also read journal articles and participate in faculty research. Faculty members teach, but they also do research and publish, and often use the same tools for both. Powerpoint is useful in class, but it’s also used for conference presentations. Safeassign can be helpful to students avoiding plagiarism, but also to journal editors reviewing scholarly papers. Blackboard’s primary mission is support for UO CRN courses, but to the extent we can also make the tool more useful in supporting the research of the university we’re committed to doing so.

We will be using our scheduled downtime on Saturday May 10, 2008 from 7:00am until noon. During this time we will be installing a security patch for Blackboard. There will be no user visible changes to the system.

For more information on the Blackboard downtime schedule, see the downtime schedule page.

If you have an assignment to turn in a paper through Blackboard’s SafeAssign, the software will automatically scan your assignment and generate an “originality report” noting any portions of the paper that resemble other work on the web or in the safeassign database. It’s a great tool for helping you avoid accidental plagiarism and see which materials in a term paper particularly need to be cited.

SafeAssign can handle term papers in several commonly used formats, including Microsoft Word “.doc” files, PDF, plain ascii text, RTF, and HTML. One format that it can not handle, though, is the new “Word 2007″ format (sometimes called “OOXML”, and having a file extension of “.docx”). If you use Word 2007, you’ll need to save your document as “Word 97-2003″ format.

Most Word 2007 users will actually find that it’s a good idea to change their default format for documents, since SafeAssign is not alone — many people can’t open a .docx document if you share it with them. In Word, click the Office menu button and select “Word Options.” On the Save tab, change your default format to “Word 97-2003 Document (*.doc)”:

For more information about SafeAssign see the safeassign wiki.

Not an April Fool, unfortunately. We experienced sudden very high loads on our blackboard servers this morning at about 11:40. Restarting the application servers resolved the problems, but the Blackboard system was unavailable for about 10 minutes.

We are investigating the root causes of the problem.

The maintenance of the Blackboard servers has been completed. We updated the operating systems on all application servers and made a few minor configuration changes to the Blackboard system.

Information Services has announced that the Duck ID system will be down for maintenance between 7 and 9am Saturday morning, March 22, to move the database to a new server.

Password changes and account management at http://account.uoregon.edu will be unavailable during this time.

LDAP authentication services will still be available, so we do not expect it to affect the Blackboard system (which uses LDAP to check passwords).

We’re experimenting with occasionally including brief technology tips for Blackboard users on our Blackboard blog. Here’s one you may find useful.

Using the “Find” to search a webpage:

Did you know that pressing Ctrl-F (Windows) and Cmd-F (Mac) brings up a search field in your browser so that you can search on a keyword in the page you have open? This can be particularly useful when looking for a particular word in a very long list of items in a Blackboard content area.