At the BbWorld 07 conference the last July, Blackboard surprised us all by announcing they had acquired an OEM version of Safe Assignment, which they are relabeling as Safe Assign and giving at no charge to all Blackboard Enterprise customers.
We’re going to switch to the Blackboard version starting Friday August 17th. The switchover will not cause any data loss. There is a migration procedure we have to go through to move our institutional database from mydropbox to Blackboard. While the migration is happening, Safe Assignment will be unavailable on myUSF. Once the migration is complete, the new Safe Assign will be installed, and all existing Safe Assignment documents will be serviced by the new tool.
Additionally, we will be disabling Course Copy while the migration is in progress. We do not know what the effect of copying a course with Safe Assignments would be while the tool is being migrated. The migration is expected to take 4-5 days, after which Course Copy will be reenabled.
There are no changes required by the instructor. The migration will occur silently, and once complete there will be no changes to the structure of existing courses. Creating and using Safe Assign documents will work the same as it did with Safe Assignment.
Blackboard has a put up a good website with resources for using Safe Assign.
August 13th, 2007 at 8:48 am
Will MS Word 2007 be supported?
August 13th, 2007 at 9:23 am
Word 2007 will not be supported. The package format of .docx files are being looked at to include in a future version, but there is no estimate when that inclusion will be ready. For now students are required to save their Word documents as “Word 2003″ format or as Text before submitting to Safe Assignment.
August 28th, 2007 at 10:00 pm
Thanks for the post!
September 1st, 2007 at 8:35 pm
This is more than a cute device. This in fact is an indicator of things to come.
March 25th, 2008 at 9:08 am
We, Maastricht University (Holland), are planning to migrate from Safe Assignment to Safe Assign. We are still not certain however if existing safe assignments and reports will be available after migration.
Did you use Safe Assignment extensively before switching to Safe Assign
What is your experience, did you have access to all old data after the switchover.
How long did the whole process take?
Is Safe Assigen performing well?
Thank you for your reply.
Antoinette Vesseur