myUSF Blackboard News

This one is for the students. The first tab of Blackboard is often just a slow page load that slows down getting to your courses. If you could do anything to that first tab, what would make it useful to you? What services would you want to see integrated? How should they work for you? What would it take to make Blackboard @ USF useful enough to be your homepage?

Leave you thoughts in the comments.

How Does it Work?

SafeAssign can be used in two ways.

1. Instructors can set up SafeAssignments in their Blackboard courses and let students submit papers to these assignments, in a way very similar to the one provided currently by Blackboard Learning System. As students submit papers, they are checked against SafeAssign’s comprehensive databases of source material. The papers will then be delivered to instructors through the Blackboard Learning System together with the originality reports, with the results of the matching process, attached to them. >> More on Creating SafeAssignments
2. Instructors may upload papers directly with the Direct Submit feature, without student involvement. >>More on Direct Submit

Matching Process

SafeAssign checks all submitted papers against the following databases:

• Internet - comprehensive index of documents available for public access on the Internet
• ProQuest ABI/Inform database with over 1,100 publication titles and about 2.6 million articles from ’90s to present time, updated weekly (exclusive access)
• Institutional document archives containing all papers submitted to SafeAssign by users in their respective institutions
• Global Reference Database containing papers that were volunteered by students from Blackboard client institutions to help prevent cross-institutional plagiarism.

SafeAssign Originality Report

SafeAssign generates an Originality Report with the results of the Matching process.

>>View Sample Report

>>How to Interpret SafeAssign Reports

Word 2007 documents are still incompatible with Blackboard SafeAssign. While it is on the top of Blackboard’s enhancement list in terms of priority, they are not able to assign an ETA for such support. The automatic note visible to student on all SafeAssign submission links is still correct in its listing of appropriate file types. SafeAssign only works with Word 2003 and earlier(.doc) RichText (.rtf) and Plain Text (.txt) files. Students will need to save documents written with Word 2007 as the older “Word 97-2003 Document” (.doc) format in order for them to be processed by SafeAssign.

We would like to remind users that the Office 2007 suite of applications is still extremely new, and during any such process there will be a significant period of time during which other users have not made the transfer, including many of your professors. If you have any doubt that the person receiving your file can open your highest version, we recommend saving it in a backwards-compatible format. For users of the Office XP and 2003 versions, there is Compatibility Pack available on the Microsoft website that allows those applications to interpret 2007 files, but we are unable to vouch for the effectiveness of this third-party patch.

Academic Computing has joined Blackboard’s Beta evaluation program, which gives early access to select instructors to evaluate and make recommendations on the next iteration of Blackboard’s Academic Suite. The major new functionality in Blackboard is the Grade Center, a new implementation of the Blackboard Gradebook.

We are looking for both first time users and long time Blackboard veterans to help with the testing and make recommendations.

Interested instructors should email Glen Parker at myusf@acomp.usf.edu.

Having researched and identified some of the key issues reported –in particular, the somewhat erratic appearance of Discussion Board postings, Hotfix (7.3.159.29) has been installed.

Included in this patch are important fixes and improvements to Blackboard, including:
• Appearance of Discussion Board posts issue has been resolved.
• Virtual Chat now compatible with Java 6.
• Errors associated with creating an index or altering columns during the update to 7.3 have been fixed.
• Attachments with various file extension now attach to course content areas.
• MIME type editing vulnerability has been fixed.
• Messages in Inbox now display a recipient column.

As we are committed to make improvements as our resources allow, we have resolved some of the performance issues we were experiencing and response times have been reduced.

For the last 4 years we have seen increases in Blackboard use 20-30% each year. We have also seen an increase in the complexity of how faculty use Blackboard. More are using advanced features like the Discussion Board or the Gradebook than have ever before. Given the budget reductions, new policies have been adopted by some departments asking that all course materials be posted on Blackboard. As such, more students are also being expected to use the Discussion Boards and take tests online. Each student is using more features of Blackboard, and there are simply more students using Blackboard. The net effect is causing the “traffic jam”: you can put so many cars on the road and everyone drives 70MPH; put more cars on the road, and the added traffic starts slowing everyone down to 20MPH.

Our hardware purchases over the years have enabled us to keep up with average uses, but have never been sufficient to get ahead far enough to sustain such increases in demand. Even though we do have plans that would allow us to grow the Blackboard infrastructure to maintain acceptable performance levels for the institution, the funding needs to be procured.

We understand and share the frustration of our users, but there is no quick remedy. As we are committed to make improvements as our resources allow, we will continue to look for ways to increase performance and reduce response times.