myUSF Blackboard News

On September 23 we sent out a round of email stating that courses created in 2004 and earlier would be removed from the system in 30 days. The message read as follows:

Professor @@lname,

We apologize for the blast of emails today. We are cleaning out 4 semesters of old courses,
and our tool only lets us do it one semester at a time.

In order to allocate myUSF storage resources more effectively, course
sites created in @@semester will be permanently removed from
the system. This procedure is necessary to allow for the increased
use of Blackboard within our institution.

If you wish to retain a copy of the content of the course sites
identified below, please create your own export package(s) before
@@archivedate:
@@courselist

There are a number of options available for preservation of your course content:
- Export just the Gradebook in a Comma Separated format.
- Export the entire course.

Documentation on Importing & Exporting Courses:
http://wiki.it.usf.edu/index.php/Importing_%26_Exporting_Courses

Documentation on Exporting the Gradebook:
http://wiki.it.usf.edu/index.php/Export_Gradebook

We appreciate your cooperation with this effort.

Information Technology
help@usf.edu

Since the deployment of Blackboard, IT has maintained that we would try to maintain 5 years of course sites on Blackboard as long as it was technically feasible.

2009 was a busy year for IT, and we were lax in keeping up with the course cleanups. Thus we had courses as far back as Fall 2003 on the system, 4 full semesters of courses that needed removal. We had two options for cleaning courses, (1) Stager the emails and stretch the course removal over several months, or (2) Send a bunch of emails and do all the cleanup at once. We decided option 2 was the least disruptive to faculty, hence the blast of email yesterday.

As stated in the email, there are two options for maintaining a personal archive of your old course content.
1) Export just the grades [How do I do this?]
2) Export the entire course and all it’s contents. [How do I do this?]

As a side note, we are working on two projects.

The first is a utility that will allow faculty to request development course sites. These courses would have a very long expiration date, so that faculty can build up their courses in these development sites, and copy from the development site into their actual course at the start of each semester.

In the past we had not allowed for such courses precisely because they didn’t expire, and were outside out direct control. However 10 years of running Blackboard has shown that this restriction has side effects we didn’t predict, such as the impact of that volume of course data on Blackboard.

The second project: IT is working with the Courseware Steering Committee, CTIR, and faculty groups around campus to redefine the course retention policy to shorten it from 5 years online to something much more reasonable like 1-2 years online. 98% of courses are not accessed by instructors after the first year, and 99.44% are not accessed after the second year. Additionally, the single biggest reason to access the old course sites is to make changes and copy them into the new course sites at the start of each semester.

Removing courses more frequently would make the Blackboard system more responsive for users, easier to backup, and faster to upgrade. Faster, safer, more reliable. What’s not to love?

The availability of development course sites removes the single biggest reason to keep courses for more than a year. With a handful of development sites, we can reduce the number of long term, development oriented sites from 80000 down to about 6000. That’s an order of magnitude reduction.

With luck we’ll have all of this implemented in time for our upgrade to Blackboard 9 in December. We’ll be ready to start the new decade leaner, meaner, and ready to learn.

The Blackboard system experienced an operating system kernel error on one server which cascaded and was not handled properly by the cluster, resulting in Blackboard being unavailable for about 45 90 minutes, Tuesday, September 22, from approximately 8:45-10:15pm. No data was lost as a result of this outage.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Last year we released the ability for departments and advisers to communicate with your constituents. We’ve greatly expanded the options for how those sites can be automatically populated with students. In particular, we can now identify students based on:
- Their College, department, major, concentration, or degree code
- Their education level (Freshmen, Sophomore, Undergrad, Grad, etc.)
- Their home campus
- By Course SubjectName, CourseNumber, or section (i.e. LAE, 4414, or 001)

Even better, we can build up aggregations of these criteria, so that you don’t need to maintain multiple organizations sites.
For example, you can have a single organization that is automatically populated with students who are either
1) Tampa Industrial Engineering students
-or-
2) Undergraduate Students on Polytechnic campus taking course EEL4411

Awesome, no?

These sites are full-fledged Blackboard sites. They are very useful for sending email to the students you advise, and can also be used to make available departmental documents such as program requirements, graduation applications, course authorization request forms, and any other departmental paperwork you maintain. A discussion board is available to foster communication amongst your members. File uploads, announcements, surveys, everything you can do in a Blackboard course you can do here.

If you or your college or department is interested in one or more of these organizations, please fill out the brief request form located within Blackboard on the Organizations tab “Organization/Community Request” module.

The United States is slowly falling in line with the majority of the Internet connected world and moving to web browsing on their cell phone. Naturally, our students are at least representative of this trend if not slightly skewed even more in the direction of mobile internet use. Blackboard currently supports a limited iPhone app and has a more robust one in the works. We were curious which devices we should focus on if we develop our own integration or which direction to push Blackboard Inc. in the future. Here are the results (5,751 responses):

My hypothesis going into this was that the majority of students would not have a smart phone. It’s important to note that the question is forward looking. It asks about a future purchase, so perhaps most people are thinking about buying one but don’t have one yet.

Given the longevity of Blackberry I expected to see it dominate, but the iPhone comes very close. I suspect this being asked of students is probably skewing this since they tend to be biased a bit toward Apple. The real disappointment here is the G1/Google Phone, but it seems to be part of a larger trend.

The plain cellphone and none at all is a fairly large number and I wonder what we can bring to these people? Watch this blog for a possible answer to that question very soon.

If you are a friend of Google Calendars, and an owner of a Blackboard course or Organization, this will be useful.

Within Google Calendar is a great feature for embedding calendars on other web pages. As you update your Google Calendar, the web page with the embedded calendar is automatically updated. And what is Blackboard if nothing more than a fancy web page. If you are running a course, it’s easy to put all the important dates in Google Calendar for that course and embed it in your class, so that students can then add the calendar to their own Google Calendars. For Organizations, the same benefit is available for Managers and Members.

Here’s how to embed your calendar on your website:

1. In the calendar list on the left, click the down-arrow next to the calendar you want to embed, and select Calendar settings. (Alternatively, click the Settings link at the bottom of the calendar list, then click the name of the calendar.)

2. Copy the iframe code displayed in the ‘Embed This Calendar’ section.

3. Paste this code into your website to embed your calendar. In Blackboard, this is easily done by Adding an item. Be sure to click the button for HTML source mode, or you’ll be adding the HTML code to your item and not the embedded calendar.

If you’d like to customize your embedded calendar, click the Customize the color, size, and other options link above the iframe field to access the Google Embeddable Calendar Helper. Carefully select your options in the Calendar Helper and paste the customized iframe code in your website.

To display events from multiple calendars in the same embedded calendar, simply follow the instructions above to access the Google Embeddable Calendar Helper. Then, select the checkbox next to each calendar you wish to display, in the section ‘Calendars to Display.’ Keep in mind that because the Weather Calendar pulls data based on your own settings, information from this calendar will not display if embedded on your website.

Please note that you can change the amount of information available on your calendar’s address by clicking the Change sharing settings link in the ‘Calendar Address’ section.

It’s been 4 years since this was first posted, enjoy

Click on your Welcome tab

Click the Modify Contents button in the upper right side of the frame.

Scroll down a bit until you find the modules you are looking for. Check the box next to the ones you want to add.

Finally, scroll to the bottom and click the Submit button.

You can also rearrange the modules on your page to bring important ones to the top by clicking Modify Layout

Then using the modify layout doohickie to move and remove modules from the Tab.

We’ve installed a number of modules to Blackboard, and are adding more all the time. Most modules get a write-up on this blog, so add us to your RSS feeds or check back regularly.

There is a problem with Internet Explorer 8 and External Links in Blackboard. If you create a link in Blackboard to a non-SSL site (one that begins with http:// rather than https://), IE8 will try to protect you from potentially harmful 3rd party websites by asking, “Do you only want to display content that is displayed securely” If you answer Yes (the default) to this question, then IE8 will NOT display non-secure content. That is, clicking Yes tells IE to NOT display the pages you have linked to.

Worst……Security Message…….Ever!

This is not a Blackboard problem but an IE8 security problem. Blackboard is run under SSL, so it’s secure. IE8 is being clever about links within Blackboard that go to non-SSL places. It’s really a terribly worded question by Microsoft and they should be ashamed of that.

The best suggestion for Instructors is to modify the External URL so that they open in a new window rather than in the Blackboard frame.
This short movie shows how to modify an existing URL to open in an external window.
http://screencast.com/t/K6fSV2K7Uw

If you have more than 10 External URL’s to modify to open in a new window, and would like assistance doing the conversion, please email us at help@usf.edu and we can batch change all URL’s for a given course. Please reference this article and include your specific Course_id and section to speed up the request.

The other option is to use either IE7 or Firefox 3.

If I find better workarounds I’ll update this post.

(For the Blackboard Admins out there, the behind.blackboard ticket number is 614383 )

The Blackboard sync service that provides for the Facebook and iPhone app integration with USF Blackboard is having problems now. Students htat have already signed up for the service are not receiving updates, and students signing up for the first time are receiving weird errors and references to the Scholar service.

We’ll update this post as we have more information. Please post your experiences in the comments below to help us gauge the breadth and depth of the problem.

Update: We’ve been notified that the link for downloading the iPhone App on the BbSync page is incorrectly pointing to Google. Here’s the correct AppStore link

Update: This is submitted to Blackboard as ticket # 614334. This means nothing to anyone else, but fellow Blackboard admins will be able to link their Sync cases to ours.

Just a quick tip for instructors. Students really, REALLY appreciate it when you send them email when adding announcements to your course.

It’s dead simple too. When adding an announcement, simply check the box in Step 4. Then submit the announcement as usual.

Your students will (quietly) thank you for your consideration.

There is a known issue with WebDav in Windows XP. If you try to mount the WebDav folder as a network drive, Windows will continue to ask for your password even after you submit it correctly. After three such attempts, Windows will return a message similar to “The folder cannot be mounted because it is not a valid file”.

Blackboard is aware of the problem and is working on a solution. In the meanwhile the only workaround is to use a 3rd party software to mount the Blackboard WebDav folder.

I’m looking for suitable products to use at a reasonable cost. I’ve found three that look promising. We have not tested any of these nor do we offer support for them. These are offered as a convenience only.

If you are on Mac, CyberDuck looks promising, and it’s free
http://cyberduck.ch/

For Windows XP, NetDrive and WebDrive looks promising, NetDrive if free for individual use.
http://netdrive.net/

For both OSX and Windows, individual license costs around $60
http://webdrive.com/products/webdrive/index.html

If you do try any of these out, please let us know how they worked in the comments below.