myUSF Blackboard News

Update 10/17
As of Friday Oct 17, evening, Blackboard has resolved or provided workaround for all known issues. The span of this disruption was from Oct 2nd through Oct 17th.

Created Thursday, Oct 2nd, 4:00pm
Updated Monday Oct 6th, 6:34pm
Updated Thursday Oct 9th, 9:01am
Updated Tuesday Oct 14, 11:30am
Updated Thursday Oct 16, 9:30am
Updated Thursday Oct 16, 6:06pm
Updated Friday Oct 17, 1:16pm
Updated Friday Oct 17, 3:14pm
Updated Friday Oct 17, 6:24pm

Blackboard Inc. has performed an upgrade to their SafeAssign service, and this upgrade has not gone well. Beginning Wednesday around 5pm, we received reports that Instructors were sporadically unable to access graded SafeAssignments, and students were unable to submit documents to SafeAssign. As of Thursday, 4pm Blackboard still does not have a workable solution to this problem.

Instructor/TA errors include a message similar to
“You are not authorized to perform this operation”
Blackboard looking deeper into this one and haven’t yet found a trace of this happening.

Any Instructor who encounters this problem should contact the IT Helpdesk as soon as possible at 974-1222, with the following information

• Date and time of the error (best guess)
• Browser and OS
• NetID
• CourseID
• Name of the Assignment

Students may receive a message
Submission error:
AccessRestricted.
or
Submission error:
InstanceNotFound.

Based on some of the information we’ve already collected they were able to find some interesting things while log crawling. The Blackboard developers feel they have a solid lead now. We should see a resolution on this one soon.

Any students who encounters this problem should contact the IT Helpdesk as soon as possible at 974-1222, with the following information

• Date and time of the error (best guess)
• Browser and OS
• NetID
• CourseID
• Name of the Assignment

Gradebook not updating:
This was partially our fault. We had a SafeAssign parameter set to our test environment not my.usf.edu. This wasn’t a problem
in the past, but the recent update calls back to our servers to mark the gradebook with a “!” and relies on this property to find our server.
The gradebook should update correctly now, but unfortunately there isn’t a way to update those that already submitted before the fix today. Instructors who suspect that students submitted a paper should click on the appropriate ‘-’ (hyphen) in the gradebook and look for a SafeAssign Paper Report.

Once we have a working solution, we will update this blog with the time of the fix. If you have additional questions, please contact the IT Helpdesk at 974-1222 or help@usf.edu

Update
As of Thursday, we have word that Blackboard has identified a probable cause for the problems, and is working to roll out a fix. This fix will involve an update to the Blackboard hosted service, as well as an update to the USF managed Blackboard. We do not currently have a final date for the release of this fix, but we expect it soon, within the next day or two. We’ll update once we have a firm date.

Student AccessRestricted / InstanceNotFound exception.
Another problem was identified with Safari 2.0 and 3.0 users, for both OS X and Windows.

The default configuration of Safari is to allow Cookie that I request, but not allow 3rd party cookie. The new version of SafeAssign now requires that it allow a 3rd party cookie to be set. This is a change from previous versions of the block, which managed to work without requiring the 3rd party cookie. To help ensure smooth operation while Blackboard works out this problem, please try the following

Go into Safari Preferences

Click on the Security Tab

Check the Radio button for Always

That will allow the 3rd party cookies that SafeAssign now requires.

We have word from Blackboard Inc. that a new version should be rolled out later this week or early next week. This update should address many of the errors users have reported. We will update this post when the new version is available to users.

This update should address the following issues:

• Students receive InstanceNotFound exception when trying to submit safeAssignments
• Authorization error for instructors when trying to access SafeAssign
• 404 Error when accessing grade details for a SafeAssignment.
• Missing images in the Student Submission form, view gradebook item

As for the release date, it should be this week, leaving today or tomorrow. This will be the case, barring any problems with QA on the new block. There will be an announcement made again at that time.

Please note that Blackboard SafeAssign will be unavailable for a few minutes while undergoing maintenance at 5:45 PM on Thursday, October 16, 2008. This maintenance window is to apply an update that resolves the following issues:

• Instructors receive a blank page when attempting to access the DirectSubmit section
• In SafeAssign Reports, some user’s names appear as “null null”
• Users with third-party cookies disabled in their browser received Instance Not Found errors without warning. (Note: third-party cookies are still required to be enabled, but users are now warned that third-party cookies must be enabled.)
• In some cases, when a student submitted a paper to a SafeAssignment the GradeCenter/GradeBook was not updated from a hyphen ( - ) to an exclamation point ( ! ).

Blackboard has applied a fix to their servers, and we have updated the corresponding software on our local version of Blackboard.

If you were having problems with Safe Assign before, please try your actions again and see if things are improved. If they are not, please send an email to help@usf.edu with the steps you are taking, the course you are in, and what errors you are seeing.

Safe Assign is experiencing a new problem with their Virginia servers. Instructors attempting to retrieve a Report are frequently seeing an error message similar to:

An unexpected error has occurred. For reference, the Error ID is: cdf....ab3.

Blackboard is is aware of and working to resolve this latest problem.