myUSF Blackboard News

The Document Unpackager tool allows you to upload a zip file containing folders and files to Blackboard. It is then unpackaged and course content items are created with the files attached. The directory structure within the zip file is translated into folders within Blackboard.

Follow the steps below to access the Document Package tool:

1. Select a Content Area, such as Course Documents, in the Control Panel.
2. From the main Content Area page, or from any nested folder, select Document Package from the drop-down list and click Go. The tool page will appear.

The new My Organizations Plus portal module provides access to organization sites as well as the added ability to manage organization enrollments. Users with the role of “Leader” in an organization will be able to add users, batch add users, remove users, and batch remove users.

Follow the steps below to add the My Organizations Plus module to a content page:

1. Open the myUSF tab or another tab with modules.
2. Click Modify Content on the upper right hand corner.
3. Check the box next to My Organizations Plus. Click Submit.

Please remember that using your courses to spam other students is strictly forbidden and can lead to the revocation of computing privileges at the University. Your agreement with the University upon signing up for you NetID forbids:

*Using facilities, including printers, for junk mail, mass mailing, or non-course-related work.
*Use computing resources for private profit, or for promoting a religious or political group.

Spam, in the context of Blackboard, is anything not related to the course or is not approved by your instructor. You may yearn to tell your class about Crazy Go Nuts University’s Summer Social, but there are better venues for these types of messages. The University maintains a number of mailing lists, the most popular of which being USF-TALK, which allow these types of announcements.

Please respect your classmates. They opted into no agreements to receive non-course related mail.

Sign up for USF-TALK:
http://listserv.admin.usf.edu/listserv/wa.exe?SUBED1=usftalk&A=1

Your Network Access Agreement with the University:
https://una.acomp.usf.edu/comp-agreement-static.html

Everything you wanted to know about Spam but were afraid to ask:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spam

Apply to Crazy Go Nuts University
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail26.html

Yum…. Spam:
http://www.pitt.edu/~blair1/spam-recipes.html

We have been having some issues with the Safe Assignment tool in myUSF and have had numerous reports of unexpected or flawed behavior of the software. We understand how troubling this performance is and are doing our best to get fixes from the company ASAP. We are somewhat surprised by the behavior, especially given the size of some of Safe Assignment’s customers. Academic Computing is in communication with the company that produced this software and hope to see some improvement in the programs behavior soon.

In the meantime, the company has given us some information as to their design in an effort to minimize the problems that we are seeing.

• Quick Submit is intended for letting instructors quickly
  check a few papers in case an instructor wants to check a few suspicious
  papers from a course which is not checked by SafeAssignment or a few
  students failed to submit papers to SA. So, it is optimized for working
  with batches of 10-50 papers.
• The Delete
  function is created to delete student papers when a student uploads an
  incorrect file. Typically, files should never be deleted from the system. The purpose of the Delete function is to delete papers from the institutional database. This function was created to let instructors delete
  student papers from the internal search database. Correctly submitted files should NEVER be deleted. Papers are automatically archived when the corresponding Course is over, but they stay
  in the institutional database after that.
• If you have submitted a paper and you try to view the SA Report on the paper and the page is blank. The paper has not been checked yet (We know that this is a poor design, and we are told that this will be repaired shortly).

Blackboard’s Assignment tool is still functioning properly and can be used in cases where an instructor is not concerned about high possibilities of plagiarism. We are attempting to identify common errors and to rigorously document the conditions in which the errors occured in an effort to communicate to the company specific cases of problems that can be used to solve our issues.

We are aware of the seriousness of these flaws and are doing everything in our power to rectify this situation.