Blackboard News

Blackboard will be down for maintenance on Saturday June 16, 2012 starting at 8:00am and will be available again no later than 6:00pm. During this time the latest Blackboard service pack will be installed. More details on the new version will be posted later.

The duckid.uoregon.edu system for changing passwords was down on Saturday, but is is now back in operation. Please contact UO Information Services for more information.

There will be maintenance on the SafeAssign servers starting April 5 at 11pm PDT until 1am PDT April 6. During this time students will not be able to submit SafeAssignments and instructors will not be able to access reports or create new assignments. The rest of the Blackboard system will not be affected by this maintenance.

The original announcement from Blackboard follows:
On Friday April 6th, 2012 between the hours of 02:00 am to 04:00 am US Eastern, the Managed Hosting Datacenter Infrastructure Team will be performing preventative maintenance on the Blackboard Beyond Production Environment for Safeassign. During this 2 hour period,the Blackboard Safeassign client applications will be unavailable.

For questions, please contact Managed Hosting Support at 1.888.788.5264 (US/Canada toll-free), or +1.202.715.6019, or your local toll-free number found at
http://www.blackboard.com/support/phonenumbers.aspx or submit a ticket through https://behind.blackboard.com.

Spring term is here.

Reminder: the place to start for blackboard help is http://libweb.uoregon.edu/scis/blackboard/help.

Students: notice that your My Courses still lists courses from winter and may not list all of your spring courses.  That’s as expected.

As usual, coursesites from winter term will remain available for about a week, then will disappear from students’ My Courses lists.  And spring term coursesites will only appear when the professor makes them available.

Instructors: remember that you must make your site “available” to allow your students to see it. After you have added some content, visit Control Panel > Customization > Properties and change Availability to “yes.” For more information see the FAQ at http://libweb.uoregon.edu/scis/blackboard/faq/instructors/i47.html.

There will be a series of power outages during spring break, 3/27 and 3/28. .

We don’t have many details from Campus Operations, but best guess is that there will be several campus-wide outages early in the mornings of 3/27 and 3/28. Most buildings and systems should be back on line by 8am

Check out some free webinars on effective use of Blackboard in teaching:

The Blackboard Innovative Teaching Series (BITS) is a free monthly webinar series from Blackboard, Inc. on how to use Blackboard to improve teaching. View the BITS schedule.  The first webinar in the series is

Session #1: Wikis, Blogs, Forums, Journals—Which One Do I Use & Why?
Time & Date: 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm ET, Monday, February 27, 2012

The UO’s Teaching Effectiveness Program also offers a series of workshops and other advice on teaching with Blackboard and other technologies.  See http://tep.uoregon.edu/technology/.

For online help that is more focused on “how to” than on “why”, we’ve also collected additional resources for instructors on our faculty help pages.

With the addition of the new file system into Blackboard, it’s become much easier to organize files within courses. We’ll be focusing on the single course license given to most instructors, how the system works, how to organize and upload files and how to link those files into your main Blackboard site.

The file system is basically the uploaded content/files that make up a certain course. All the images, course readings, audio files, etc. are all considered files that can be uploaded onto your Blackboard course site. If you click on the “Files” link under the Control Panel, you’ll be presented with three green buttons: Upload, Create HTML Object and Create Folder. For organizational purposes, it’s prudent to create folders for separate learning materials and upload files into those folders. For example, if I’m teaching a linguistics course and I want one class session to focus on semiology and the works of Derrida and Foucault, I’d create a folder titled “LING PoMo” and upload the Derrida and Foucault readings into that folder. Whatever system works for you, use it.

In order to upload files, you click the “Upload” button and then choose “Upload Files” or “Upload Package.” The “Upload Package” option is for zipped files which are then automatically unzipped with the preexisting file structure still intact – this is helpful if you have a lot of readings and don’t want to upload all of them one at a time. After hitting “Upload,” Blackboard gives you the option of browsing your computer’s hard drive for the files or simply dragging the files from your computer’s folder. After the specific files are selected, hit “Submit.”

In order to finally link the uploaded files to your Blackboard course site, simply click the Content area where you want the files to appear. Once you’re in this content area, click “Build Content” and choose “File.” You now have the option to upload something from your computer or upload something from the “Files” section. This ensures that if the particular content isn’t on a particular computer, that content will stay uploaded in the Blackboard main site, making it accessible from anywhere.

The Files directory allows you to set visibility and editing permissions conveniently based on the user’s role. Also note that if you delete a file form the content area it does not delete it from the Files directory.  The best way to maintain file versions is to create a copy of that document in the directory, make changes, then from within the content area link to the updated file.

For more details please view our related FAQ!

Taking a class using Blackboard:

If it’s a UO course that you’re taking this term, then you’ve been enrolled automatically. After logging into Blackboard, look under the “My Courses” heading. You should see links for all courses in the current term that (a) you are registered for and (b) are using Blackboard. If your class is not on this list, and you’ve been registered for the class for more than 24 hours (please verify your enrollment on DuckWeb), contact your instructor to find out if the course is actually using Blackboard.

For more information on Blackboard view our Introduction webcast.

Can’t log into Blackboard:

You’ll need your Duck ID to log in.  It’s a username, like “jdoe”, not a number, which gives you an email address and the username you’ll need for blackboard.   For more about your Duck ID, see http://it.uoregon.edu/help/duckid/.  If you don’t have one, go to http://duckid.uoregon.edu and create  (“claim”) it,  In order to log in for the first time and create your Duck ID you’ll need your numeric student ID and PAC (the information you used to log in to DuckWeb).  For problems creating your Duck ID we need to refer you to the Information Services Help Desk. They are at 541-346-HELP.

Also check to see if your password has expired by attempting to log into Webmail.

Why do I still see last terms classes?

During the few days of a new term we keep old classes from the previous term available to allow students to check their grades or deal with an incomplete. The old classes then disappear, typically at the beginning of the second week of the term.

Classes for the new term appear when the instructor marks the blackboard site for the class as “available”. This might occur before the start of the new term, or the instructor might not get to it until after a few days of a new term, and some instructors decide not to use blackboard at all. If you’re enrolled in a class and the instructor has told the class that she or he is using blackboard, check to see if you can see the coursesite. If not, first check DuckWeb to make sure you actually are registered for that CRN, then check with the instructor to make sure that she or he has made the site available.

We made a number of changes to the blackboard system during winter break, though most users are unlikely to notice them.  Here’s a rundown on some of what we did:

First, we made a major upgrade to the database hardware that supports the blackboard system, with the goal of improving both performance and availability.  Previously we ran a single database server plus a “hot spare” that we could swap in if there were problems.  Information Services upgraded the hardware extensively, and also switched to “Oracle RAC”, which allows us to simultaneously run two database servers located in different computer rooms.  At any given time your blackboard session might query either one.  If one of the two servers fails or is temporarily disconnected from the network, then everything will continue to operate (though slightly more slowly) without any interruption in service.  Also during the break Information Services did quite a bit of hardware relocation and installed firewall and load balancer changes, all of which should contribute to improved availability in the future.

Second, we upgraded the Blackboard software version from BB 9.1 SP 5 to BB 9.1 SP 7, plus installed the latest security and hotfixes.  Although there aren’t many user-visible changes, the new version does include a few (in addition to more than 100 miscellaneous bug fixes):

• Browser Support – Chrome is now on the list of supported browsers. Blackboard has indicated they are now supporting the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari (Mac only), and IE 9.  All browsers still have quirks, though.
• Automatic Saving of Assessment Attempts - Tests now auto-save every minute as a student takes an online quiz.
• Timed Assessment Improvements – Timed assessments can now be set to autosubmit and shut off at the designated time, rather than just indicating how long the student ran over the set time period.
• Needs Grading – If an instructor has marked a wiki, journal, blog, or discussion board as being graded, then the grade center will indicate students whose work “needs grading”, as it already did with assignments and assessments.
• Interactive Rubrics – Interactive rubrics can now be created, pulled in when grading assignments, discussion posts, etc., and made available to students with instructor’s comments.
• New SCORM Engine – The SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) player has been updated. This also incorporates new activity/progress reporting from the Control Panel. Softchalk and other products can save output in SCORM format for use in Blackboard.
• Publisher Integration - We installed a building block that allows instructors to integrate online textbook content from McGraw-Hill “Connect”.  Watch these tutorials on how establish the connection:

• Adding NBC Archives Video Content Watch It!
• Pair Your Blackboard Course with Your McGraw-Hill Connect Section Watch It!
• Prepare Your Students for McGraw-Hill Connect and Blackboard Watch It!
• Add Your McGraw-Hill Connect Assignments within Blackboard Watch It!
• Deploy Your McGraw-Hill Connect Assignments to Blackboard Watch It!

We’ve also been told that Blackboard upgraded their SafeAssign servers during the holidays.  This may imply that we’ll see shorter delays this term when students submit SafeAssignments.

Winter term is here.

Reminder: the place to start for blackboard help is http://libweb.uoregon.edu/scis/blackboard/help.

Students: notice that your My Courses still lists courses from fall and may not list all of your winter courses.  That’s as expected.

As usual, coursesites from fall term will remain available for about a week, then will disappear from students’ My Courses lists.  And winter term coursesites will only appear when the professor makes them available.

Instructors: remember that you must make your site “available” to allow your students to see it. After you have added some content, visit Control Panel > Customization > Properties and change Availability to “yes.” For more information see the FAQ at http://libweb.uoregon.edu/scis/blackboard/faq/instructors/i47.html.