myUSF Blackboard News

USF Academic Computing has renewed it’s license for Learning Objects - Campus Pack software. This suite of tools is integrated with your MyUSF courses. New this year: Podcasting.

Sample podcast subscription screen, complete with simple RSS subscription and quick iTunes subscription link

An instructor creates a podcast and adds episodes with the same few steps needed to add other content to his course. With one click, an instructor can generate an RSS link to the podcast. Students have the convenience of accessing recordings either from within the course or offline. A quick drag-and drop of the RSS link establishes the subscription to the RSS feed. Episodes are then automatically downloaded to the student’s portable device.

To add a new Podcast Episode, go into any content area of your course, and select to add a Podcast Episode from the pulldown menu on the right.

To subscribe to your courses podcast, go into the course tools page, then click the Podcast page. In here you’ll see links to the RSS feed and a shortcut to quickly add the RSS feed to iTunes.

Only three clicks to subscribe to a podcast. (third click not shown)

Podcast LX is currently available to any MyUSF course or organizations.

I found a Blackboard Suggestion box today while doing some research into another problem.

[ http://www.blackboard.com/products/suggest.bb ]

Have a simple change to the Gradebook that would shave hours of your daily workload? Mad as hell about the changes to the Discussion Board? Want a Bb-enabled version of Rate My Professor? Whatever you think would make Blackboard better, here’s your chance.

When Blackboard asks, tell them USF is a 7.x Enterprise License

USF has a “Blackboard Learning Systems Enterprise License 7.x”

We want to hear your opinions too. Please post your suggestions to the comments of this or any bbnews blog post. As always, if you are having immediate problems with your Blackboard course, please call the Academic Computing Helpdesk at 974-1222.

USF Academic Computing has secured a site-license so that all USF instructors can use Respondus StudyMate product. Here are a whole bunch of good reasons to give StudyMate a try

1. Create Flash-based activities and games using an “offline” Windows interface
2. Create activities for use on iPods, Sony Playstation Portable (PSP) and other small screen devices
3. Four templates let you create ten activities and games (view sample activities here)
4. Import existing content from Respondus, MS Word, rich-text, IMS QTI, and other formats
5. Download publisher test banks for use with StudyMate from the Respondus Test Bank Network
6. “Spell check” an entire file (includes dictionaries for American English, Canadian English, British English, French, German, Spanish, Dutch, Finnish, and a comprehensive medical dictionary)
7. Insert graphics such as gif, jpeg, bmp, png, and pcx
8. Embed audio files such as mp3 or wav
9. Convert oversized graphics to a suitable size with one click
10. Create algorithmic questions using the “Calculated” template
11. Insert mathematical and scientific symbols using the built-in Equation Editor or MathType
12. Add links to content on other servers with the Web Link tool
13. Use the Quick Copy Wizard to quickly assemble activities from existing StudyMate files or publisher test banks
14. Randomize questions and answer choices so the activity is different each time it’s started

This tool is prepaid for all USF instructors.

To get the software, log into MyUSF, and add the module “Respondus Products” to your MyUSF Tab. This module is only available to USF instructors assigned to teach according to Oasis, so if you don’t see the module, that’s probably why.

License password for StudyMate is in the comments when you download the file

There’s lots of documentation and tutorials, like this movie, available on the Respondus web site

This one goes out to the content creators among us. Instructors, you know who you are.

A bug in all versions of Internet Explorer prevents the Blackboard Visual TextBox Editor from successfully uploading files when embedding attachments in content items. The symptoms of breakage look like a 404 Not Found error or a 403 Forbidden error, depending on if you are the instructor or a student looking at the attached document.

Firefox is not affected by this problem. If you wish to post attachments in the VTBE, please use Firefox.

If attaching, use Firefox, not Internet Explorer

Also, the option to attach a single file to any new Blackboard document continues to work in all browsers

Any web browser can attach in step 2

Once files are correctly attached using Firefox or “Step 2″, then any browser can be used to download the attachments. The bug only affects the initial attachment of the files.

If you already created Blackboard items that now contain broken attachments, the only known solution is to use Firefox to edit the document, remove the broken attachments, and reattach the files. If you would like more information or extra instruction how to resolve this problem, please contact the Academic Computing Helpdesk at 974-1222.

Snapshots are run regularly which normally update Blackboard with information about instructor assignments and students enrollments.

Around 8am, Sunday May 20, we had a bad run of those snapshots which returned no information from Oasis. This lack of Oasis data was then processed, which resulted in all Summer instructor and student assignments disabled in Blackboard. This was identified and corrected by 10am Sunday.

No student data was lost as a result of this error. All student submissions entered prior to the error are back online along with Blackboard access.

Working with Grand Rapids Community College, Seton Hall University, the University of South Florida Academic Computing and other clients, Blackboard has focused Release 7.2 on Student Achievement, providing major new functionality to:

• Alert faculty and advisors early on to trends in student performance, and enable them to communicate with students to take appropriate action;
• Enable faculty, tutors, and other advisors to carefully observe and improve student performance; and
• Increase flexibility for all users to access, manage, and organize content and Portfolios.

These new tools are available to all instructors/managers of any course or organization within MyUSF. Look for them in your Control Panel.

Click either tool to get started

Documentation will be linked to here, shortly.

The bug that was addressed on Sunday has apparently introduced a new problem to those beleagured T2000 servers. This time, the machines that were patched are having permission problems writing to the shared storage. In particular it’s affecting the ability to upload files in certain situations we don’t completely understand, yet.

For example, when an instructor creates a new content item, the WYSIWYG editor lets them attach one or more data files to the content item. When the item is submitted to Blackbaord, the files are uploaded to a temporary location that is local to one of the servers in the cluster. Once all the files are received by Blackboard and verified, they are copied to a more permanent location on the shared storage, so that all servers in the cluster can see them. The problem is that when the server the instructor was on is one of the affected T2000’s, the files aren’t copied correctly to the shared storage location, and broken links are the result for everyone who later clicks those links.

If you are an instructor who created content and are seeing this problem, please contact the Academic Computing Helpdesk at 974-1222 and one of the Blackboard administrators on duty can help recover the broken items.

The good news is that we still have the V440’s available, and they don’t suffer this problem. We’ve adjusted load balancing so that only the V440’s are serving blackboard, so there should be no new problems created.

It took longer than we wanted, but the ability to customize the Course List module is back to working correctly again. If your unfamiliar with the feature, the Course List module provides a very nice option to edit which courses are actually displayed to you, so that if you’ve been added to courses that you aren’t actually using, those courses won’t clutter up your Courses Tab.

The Upgrade to 7.2 introduced two rather devious bugs into the edit page of the Course List module. If you clicked the pencil icon to
edit the display, Blackboard would paginate your list of possible courses into pages of 25. The first bug prevented you from advancing
off the first page of 25. If you clicked the Next button, you would get an unhelpful error message.

Even worse, if you clicked submit, then all courses after the first 25 (those on pages 2+) would be marked by Blackboard to NOT display, so that they would no longer display in the module. This coupled with the inability to edit pages 2+ meant that you were effectively locked
out of your courses. Yikes!

We received a fix from Blackboard so the display is now editable. Here’s how:

Go to your Courses Tab

Click the Pencil icon next in the Course List module

Check the boxin the display column for courses you want to see, uncheck the box for those you don’t

Scroll down and click

You should now have a Course List customized to your individual needs.

A very nice bonus to come of this problem, in searching for a solution, we came across a brand new courses module developed by
Seneca college, which is very slick and has a couple of really nice shortcut features. We’ll be releasing this as an alternative to the Course List module in a few days so you can use whichever one you prefer.

Many serious problems with Blackboard were encountered after the upgrade Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. The symptoms were ugly error messages that appeared in many places, in particular when submitting a test, posting to the discussion boards, or uploading files.

The problem was identified and normal operations restored by 4pm on Sunday.

– Details –

What the heck happened Saturday and Sunday. The upgrade finished without incident, but them you were logging into Blackboard to take a quiz, talk on the discussion boards, or upload a syllabus, and you received some very ugly error messages. The worst part was that your coworker in the next office was not having a problem.

What happened is that MyUSF is powered by two classes of server hardware, older Sun V440’s, and newer Sun T2000’s. The operating system is the same across both platforms, but they are different architectures and so there are differences in how certain algorithms are implemented. In this case, the bug was in the cryptography libraries, and affected how random numbers were generated, but only on the T2000’s. Whenever Blackboard needed a new random number, it would instead receive an error from Java, which would be passed up to Tomcat, which would then be passed on to your web browser. If you were unlucky enough to be served by one of the T2000’s during the problem, then you likely encountered serious problems.

The bug does have a patch, which has been applied and MyUSF is again running at 100%.

The following dates regarding enrollment and availability of the course sites may be of interest for everyone:

• May 5th: A07, B07, C07, X07 Summer courses will be made available (i.e., visible) to students
• May 14th: F07 Fall courses will be made available to instructors
• May 28th: S07 Spring courses will be made unavailable to students