myUSF Blackboard News

Problem

Collecting Messages in any discussion board redraws the screen in such a way as to prevent subsequent viewings.

Here’s how to recreate the problem

1. Go into any discussion board discussion
2. Check the boxes next to some threads, or else select all threads, click Collect to collect the messages
3. Observe at this point that the screen with the collected messages loses it’s top tab frame
4. Scroll to the bottom of the collected messages and click OK(or else click the breadcrumb bar) to return to the discussion forum
5. Observe that the page is still without the top tab frame
6. No longer will threads display in the thread box, and the whole lower message pane will not render.

You can try to go to any other discussion post. So long as the top frame is missing, the discussion board will not work correctly. Collecting messages causes the page to be redrawn sans top frame.

Browser window without the tab frame, and no discussion board posts where there should be four

Work Around

The most straightforward solution is to reload the URL https://my.usf.edu, which will redraw the screen with a proper tabset on the top frame. You can then go into your course Tab and reenter your course.

It works, but it’s cumbersome.

When we come up with a better solution we’ll update this post.

Update: July 23

Good News, this problem, along with a huge host of other Discussion Board problems, is resolved in the upcoming 7.3 release. We are evaluating 7.3 now to determine when it can be put into production.

The AOI WYSIWYG is a third-party building block that Academic Computing installed 5 years ago for Blackboard 6.0.11. AOI stopped developing and supporting the tool when they went out of business around the time of Blackboard 6.3. Even though it continued to function at this time, Academic Computing marked the tool as deprecated. With Blackboard 7.1, Blackboard supplied their own WYSIWYG editor, the Visual Text Box Editor (VTBE) for users of Internet Explorer, and with 7.2, the VTBE is available to all web browsers.

The AOI tool is broken in Blackboard 7.2 due to incompatibilities with the latest version. Clicking Modify to try an edit an AOI document returns the following error message:

Anyone using AOI should have received an email with suggestions on migrating the content in their AOI documents to the Blackboard WYSIWYG tool. In a nutshell, copy and paste the content from your AOI document into the VTBE, and most of the formating should be preserved. Any links to content or file attachments will need to be recreated.

Please contact the Academic Computing Helpdesk at 974-1222 if you would like help migrating AOI documents.

A healthy dicussion board posting

Symptoms:

A discussion board thread that has multiple replies to it may suddenly have the text of that original thread deleted and replaced with an Oracle Clob error message embedded in an HTML comment.

This will manifest itself visually in two ways

1) When viewing the discussion board, the parent thread will appear to have a empty message body. The owner, origianl post date, star ratings, everything else about the original post will be retained, but the message body is blank.

Notice the blank space where message text should normally appear

2) When editing the original discussion board thread, The body of the message when viewed with the Basic textbox editor(or with the enhanced VTBE editor in HTML source mode), you will see the following string of text

<!– Oracle does not fully support LOB manipulation (inserting or updating) using a PreparedStatement. Instead you must manipulate the LOB through the ResultSet returned by a “SELECT FOR UPDATE” query. –>

Action shot of the error message in the basic text editor

Details:

The problem occurs when two people are writing replies to the same discussion board post at the same time. When the first person submits the reply, Blackboard places a lock on the parent to update the hit count for that post. Then when the second person submits, they also attempt to put a lock on the parent post, but that fails due to the first already being present. Instead, the second reply receives an error message. The bug is that stores the error message as the body of the parent post rather than recognize that an error was thrown. When the second post gets to update finally, it also updates the parent post, setting the message body of the parent to the error message.

Workaround:

Since the original text of the parent message is deleted and replaced with the database error HTML comment, the only workarounds are to recreate the message post.

The instructor can retype the post if an instructor created it.
If settings allow, the student can also retype the post.

Blackboard is aware of the problem, and we are awaiting a hotfix.

Instructors
Automated Instructor assignments into Blackboard begin 6 weeks before the start of Fall semester.
That would be Monday July 16th.

Instructors looking to get early access to Fall courses prior to July 16th should send a request to myusf@acomp.usf.edu

Students
Automated Student enrollmetns begin the day after finals. For Fall, this would be the day after the last day of Summer B, which is August 11th.

Students looking to get early access to Fall courses prior to August 11th should just be patient.

Thanks to a joint effort between Seneca College and USF Academic Computing, we’re pleased to release an interesting alternative to the standard Blackboard Course List module. My Course Plus provides a new way to organize the display of your courses, and shortcuts into your most frequently accessed course tools.

First of all, courses are grouped by semester. As detailed in this article on MyUSF Course ID’s, each folder is identified by it’s 3 character semester and year designator. Clicking the plus or minus will expand or collapse the list of courses for that semester.

Quick Tools

Each course has an icon to the left, which when clicked, will expose a couple of additional links. Clicking these links will take you directly to certain areas of your course. Shortcuts are available to take you directly to your Discussion Board, Gradebook, Announcements, or the Control Panel.

Click the button to expose quick access tools

Quickly go into your Discussion Board, Gradebook, Announcements, or Control Panel

Students also have access to My Course Plus. The view is a little different, do to the lack of privileged functions available to students.

Everyone is welcome to add the module to any of the MyUSF tabs that allow modules. Personally, I recommend adding it to the Courses tab, and modifying the page layout so My Course Plus is in the top right position.

Have fun and post comments on this tool below.

Like the expiration date on all Mars candy bars, in Blackboard there is an encoded course id that precedes the title of your course. It’s not common knowledge that this course id actually has some meaning.

Academic Computing reads all course information from Oasis before putting it into Blackboard. Oasis uses a course reference number(CRN) that repeats every year. This means that in different years the same CRN might refer to a different course, depending on which year you are looking at. The CRN in Oasis is not unique.

Here is a sample course id as you find in your Course List.

This breaks down into the following parts

Now you know.