Wed 7 Nov 2007

Safe Assign Outage

Posted by Glen Parker under AC
1 Comment 

The servers hosting SafeAssign at Blackboard Inc. are currently experiencing unscheduled downtime. During this time, the SafeAssign tool will return an error message and you may experience a delay in the processing time for reports. Our first report of this problem was around 8:00 a.m. EDT.

Please note: this effects only those assignments which utilize the SafeAssign plagiarism service. Regular assignments are working properly.

I’ll update this when I have an ETA on service restoration.

 

Fri 2 Nov 2007

Walk-in clinics for all things Blackboard, hosted by Academic Computing

Posted by Glen Parker under AC , Blackboard , myUSF News
[5] Comments 

Now through the end of the semester, Academic Computing is hosting walk-in clinics where you can ask any questions you have related to Blackboard at USF.   There will be two sessions each week, starting on November 2:

Tuesday 4:30pm - 7:00pm
Friday 11:00am - 2:00pm

Clinics will be held in LIB 618, on the 6th floor of the Tampa campus library. No appointments are necessary, just show up and bring your best questions.

For more information, contact Drew Hannah:

drew@usf.edu
813/974-1795

Faculty may also contact the Center for 21st Century Teaching Excellence at 974-2576, http://www.c21te.usf.edu for assistance with Blackboard through workshops or individual consultations.

 

Thu 1 Nov 2007

Bugz: Timed tests slow scrolling

Posted by Glen Parker under AC , Blackboard , myUSF News
No Comments 

If a test is setup with a time limit, students taking the test will see a timer float in the upper right corner of the test window. In recent versions of the IE web browser, a bug was introduced by Microsoft which causes the page to scroll very slowly.

A workaround for this involves changing a security setting for your trusted sites in IE.

  1. Click on Tools then Internet Options.
  2. In the Security Tab, click on the Checkmark for Trusted Sites, then the Custom Settings button.
  3. In the “Scripting” section, near the bottom, is one called “Allow status bar updates via scripts”. Change this from disable to enable.

Alternatively, within the Trusted Sites section, if you set the Security slider to Medium Security or lower, this will include enabling of “Allow status bar updates via scripts”.

Each person using IE to take a test will need to perform this operation. This bug does not affect people using Firefox or Safari to take Blackboard tests.

As this is a Microsoft bug, there is no word yet from Blackboard when or if a fix will be coming from them.