Data center maintenance Tuesday Oct. 14 4am-7am no down time expected

On Tuesday October 14th from 4am until 7am PDT IS will be upgrading the load balancers that are used by the campus web services including Blackboard. No downtime is expected but there may be short periods of slowness.

If you experience any problems during this time, please wait a minute or so and try again.

Two NEW important tools for instructors!

Welcome back for Fall!  

 

We have new options; one is to make multiple courses available in one fell swoop and the other is the full student preview feature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Qwickly has a number of demo videos that demonstrate how to make announcements which show up in multiple courses!  http://www.goqwickly.com/  ;    http://www.goqwickly.com/demos/

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Student preview lets you view the course exactly as a student would and record activity while testing certain features!

https://help.blackboard.com/en-us/Learn/9.1_2014_04/Instructor/130_Student_Performance/Student_Preview

4 Great Upcoming Blackboard Workshops!

These instructional workshops will help you excel at online course setup.

Sign-up now!

 

Check this list of presentations out:

Update-Maintenance complete: Blackboard maintenance Sept 19, 8am-noon no down time

Update: the maintenance is complete. There was no down time.

Blackboard will be undergoing maintenance on Friday September 19, 2014 from 8am until noon PDT. There will be no downtime.

During this time a patch will be installed to prevent intermittent 508 http errors along with updates to the Software Updates, SafeAssign, Partner Cloud,  Assessment and Content Editor building blocks.

SafeAssign Maintenance Aug 26 11pm until Aug 27 3am

SafeAssign will be unavailable during maintenance from 11pm PDT August 26 until 3am PDT August 27. The rest of Blackboard will be unaffected by this maintenance and will remain available.

The bulletin from Blackboard follows:

SafeAssign Maintenance with Service Outage, August 27, 2014

Product: Blackboard Learn

Bulletin/Advisory Information:

The SafeAssign central services will undergo maintenance that requires a service outage on Wednesday, August 27, 2014 between 2am – 6am US Eastern (GMT -4).  SafeAssign functionality will not be available and an error will be displayed to the user.  Papers will not be processed and reports will be delayed until after the maintenance has completed.

Please contact Blackboard Client Support if you have any questions.

SafeAssign Maintenance Wed Aug 13 11pm-Thur Aug 14 5:30am

SafeAssign will be unavailable from Wednesday August 14 starting at 11:00pm PDT until 5:30am PDT Thursday August 14. During this time students will not be able to submit SafeAssignments and instructors will not be able to view origionality reports. The rest of the Blackboard services will still be available during this time.

The maintenance bulletin follows:

The SafeAssign service will be unavailable on Thursday August 14, 2014 from 2:00 AM US Eastern (GMT-4) until 8:30 AM US Eastern (GMT-4). SafeAssign is being taken offline for a database upgrade. Upon completion of this upgrade, this bulletin will be updated.

During this outage SafeAssign functionality will not be available. End-users will not be able to submit papers through SafeAssign during the planned downtime and will receive an error message if they attempt to do so.  Use of SafeAssign can continue as normal after the planned downtime is complete.
Please contact Blackboard Learn Client Support if you have any questions.

Changes to withdrawn student display

Originally if a student withdraws from a class, the Blackboard system removes their records/hides them, without notice to the faculty.  Faculty are entitled to retain/have access to the records of ALL students in their classes via the course sites, and in fact are required to retain these records per the Records Retention Policy, regardless of if the student withdrew or not.  Faculty are also required to report last date of attendance/participation for students who withdraw, and need access to all the course site information in their Bb course sites.

Many faculty would like the option of grade averages to represent all the students who took a test including those who withdrew.

On behalf of the faculty, and with full endorsement from the Director and Associate Director of Financial Aid and Scholarships the changes have been made to the Blackboard data protocols so that:

  1. those records of students who withdraw are preserved and remain accessible to the faculty teaching their courses;
  2. the students no longer have access to the site once they have withdrawn as occurs now;
  3. the faculty members should be able to see which students have withdrawn in certain areas of the course.

Under the new changes, when a student withdraws from a course instead of being removed from the course as before, they are instead marked as being “Unavailable” in the course.
They will still be seen in the course roster that the instructor can view in “Users and Groups”->”Users” where they will be list under the “Available” column as “No”.

In addition as users are marked as being “Unavailable” they will be marked to not show in the grade center.
If an instructor needs to view information for a withdrawn student in the Grade Center, they can unhide them by going to the Grade Center, then “Manage”->”Row Visibility”, check the box by the student that they want to view again and then click on “Show Rows”.

If they want to make all withdrawn students visible they can click on the box by “Last Name” to select all of the rows and then click on “Show Rows” to make all students visible in the Grade Center. The rows for withdrawn students will be automatically hidden again when Blackboard is updated from Banner twice a day.  If there is a preference for the hidden students selected by faculty to be visible in the Grade Center, please let us know.

Blackboard Maintenance Saturday, Aug 23 8am-6pm

On Saturday, August 23 the Blackboard system will be down for maintenance from 8am until no later than 6pm. During this time the Blackboard system will be upgraded to the April 2014 release.

The April 2014 release is an important update that includes such new features as a full student preview for instructors as well as integrating SafeAssign into the existing Blackboard Assignments feature enabling Crocodoc (inline grading) and Rubrics.

There are also a number of important bug fixes. Refer to the table below for more information.

Feature

Description

To Learn More
Assessments: Significant Figures In calculated formula questions, instructors can select the number of decimals or significant figures for the correct answers generated by the system. Calculated Formula Questions
Financial Aid Reporting Generate reports of student academic contribution within a single or multiple courses in Blackboard Learn 9.1. Course Reports
Grading: Anonymous Grading Instructors can hide student names from submitted assignments for anonymous grading. Anonymous Grading
Grading: Delegated Grading Instructors can delegate grading to specific users. Delegated Grading
 Profiles  The Enhanced Cloud Profile provides users with their first professional profiles. The added features help users demonstrate competencies they have developed through their educational journeys in a visual and uniquely /compelling way. If you do not see this update, your institution has not turned it on. Profiles
SafeAssign Integration SafeAssign is integrated into regular Learn assignments. Use SafeAssign in AssignmentsBest Practice: Plagiarism
SafeAssign Originality Report Changes The SafeAssign originality report has been changed in the following ways:

  • The report has been updated with a new look and feel. The report now displays multiple attachments.
  • The email option has been removed. While viewing the report, you can “print to pdf” either natively or using a plug-in based on the operating system and browser combination that you are using to create an accessible PDF. Then, you can share the PDF in multiple ways, including secure email.
  • Each source now has a color unique to the source. Text matching the source is highlighted in the unique source color. There are a maximum of 30 different colors. This matches the maximum of 30 different sources.
  • By default, all citation source highlighting is on. Instructors can click Show/Hide All Highlighting to turn source highlighting off and on for all sources at once.
  • The report layout has been improved for narrow screens. The report information and citations now appear at the top of the submission when instructors reduce the width of the viewing area.
  • Instructors click Select Sources and Resubmit to determine which sources they want to include in the next report. By default, all sources are included. Instructors can clear the check box for each source to exclude from the results. This behavior is the reverse of previous releases.
  • The page instructors are redirected to after resubmitting a paper has been updated to be more in line with the styling of the new report.
  • During the redesign of the SafeAssign originality report, it became clear that the mixed script count was potentially showing misleading and confusing information. The mixed script count identifies the potential of multiple scripts used in an assignment to hide acts of plagiarism. It was discovered that the count was based on the number of words or sentences in the text and was only triggered by Cyrillic. The count should be based on all of the ways multiple scripts can be used to avoid plagiarism detection. Also, the areas where each script was used were not identified in the document and had to be manually located. For these reasons, while the originality report continues to alert you to any use of mixed-script characters within individual words anywhere in a submission, the word count will not be available until it can be accurate for all script combinations and all instances can be highlighted in the report.
 SafeAssign Originality Reports
Student Preview Instructors can view their course exactly as a student does by using a student account the system generates for them. Student Preview
User Interface: Frames Removed Frames have been completely removed from the Learn application and replaced with HTML5 compliant DIVs and iFrames. This change improves page printing, accessibility, and page navigation. Administrator
(in English only)
Mobile Learn All Learn 9.1 Releases This update includes resolved issues.
My Grades All Learn 9.1 Releases The look and feel of My Grades has been updated. Students now view feedback by clicking View Feedback.

 

We set the date for the upgrade to happen on August 23rd in accordance to the Registrar.