myUSF Blackboard News

The United States is slowly falling in line with the majority of the Internet connected world and moving to web browsing on their cell phone. Naturally, our students are at least representative of this trend if not slightly skewed even more in the direction of mobile internet use. Blackboard currently supports a limited iPhone app and has a more robust one in the works. We were curious which devices we should focus on if we develop our own integration or which direction to push Blackboard Inc. in the future. Here are the results (5,751 responses):

My hypothesis going into this was that the majority of students would not have a smart phone. It’s important to note that the question is forward looking. It asks about a future purchase, so perhaps most people are thinking about buying one but don’t have one yet.

Given the longevity of Blackberry I expected to see it dominate, but the iPhone comes very close. I suspect this being asked of students is probably skewing this since they tend to be biased a bit toward Apple. The real disappointment here is the G1/Google Phone, but it seems to be part of a larger trend.

The plain cellphone and none at all is a fairly large number and I wonder what we can bring to these people? Watch this blog for a possible answer to that question very soon.

If you are a friend of Google Calendars, and an owner of a Blackboard course or Organization, this will be useful.

Within Google Calendar is a great feature for embedding calendars on other web pages. As you update your Google Calendar, the web page with the embedded calendar is automatically updated. And what is Blackboard if nothing more than a fancy web page. If you are running a course, it’s easy to put all the important dates in Google Calendar for that course and embed it in your class, so that students can then add the calendar to their own Google Calendars. For Organizations, the same benefit is available for Managers and Members.

Here’s how to embed your calendar on your website:

1. In the calendar list on the left, click the down-arrow next to the calendar you want to embed, and select Calendar settings. (Alternatively, click the Settings link at the bottom of the calendar list, then click the name of the calendar.)

2. Copy the iframe code displayed in the ‘Embed This Calendar’ section.

3. Paste this code into your website to embed your calendar. In Blackboard, this is easily done by Adding an item. Be sure to click the button for HTML source mode, or you’ll be adding the HTML code to your item and not the embedded calendar.

If you’d like to customize your embedded calendar, click the Customize the color, size, and other options link above the iframe field to access the Google Embeddable Calendar Helper. Carefully select your options in the Calendar Helper and paste the customized iframe code in your website.

To display events from multiple calendars in the same embedded calendar, simply follow the instructions above to access the Google Embeddable Calendar Helper. Then, select the checkbox next to each calendar you wish to display, in the section ‘Calendars to Display.’ Keep in mind that because the Weather Calendar pulls data based on your own settings, information from this calendar will not display if embedded on your website.

Please note that you can change the amount of information available on your calendar’s address by clicking the Change sharing settings link in the ‘Calendar Address’ section.

It’s been 4 years since this was first posted, enjoy

Click on your Welcome tab

Click the Modify Contents button in the upper right side of the frame.

Scroll down a bit until you find the modules you are looking for. Check the box next to the ones you want to add.

Finally, scroll to the bottom and click the Submit button.

You can also rearrange the modules on your page to bring important ones to the top by clicking Modify Layout

Then using the modify layout doohickie to move and remove modules from the Tab.

We’ve installed a number of modules to Blackboard, and are adding more all the time. Most modules get a write-up on this blog, so add us to your RSS feeds or check back regularly.

There is a problem with Internet Explorer 8 and External Links in Blackboard. If you create a link in Blackboard to a non-SSL site (one that begins with http:// rather than https://), IE8 will try to protect you from potentially harmful 3rd party websites by asking, “Do you only want to display content that is displayed securely” If you answer Yes (the default) to this question, then IE8 will NOT display non-secure content. That is, clicking Yes tells IE to NOT display the pages you have linked to.

Worst……Security Message…….Ever!

This is not a Blackboard problem but an IE8 security problem. Blackboard is run under SSL, so it’s secure. IE8 is being clever about links within Blackboard that go to non-SSL places. It’s really a terribly worded question by Microsoft and they should be ashamed of that.

The best suggestion for Instructors is to modify the External URL so that they open in a new window rather than in the Blackboard frame.
This short movie shows how to modify an existing URL to open in an external window.
http://screencast.com/t/K6fSV2K7Uw

If you have more than 10 External URL’s to modify to open in a new window, and would like assistance doing the conversion, please email us at help@usf.edu and we can batch change all URL’s for a given course. Please reference this article and include your specific Course_id and section to speed up the request.

The other option is to use either IE7 or Firefox 3.

If I find better workarounds I’ll update this post.

(For the Blackboard Admins out there, the behind.blackboard ticket number is 614383 )

The Blackboard sync service that provides for the Facebook and iPhone app integration with USF Blackboard is having problems now. Students htat have already signed up for the service are not receiving updates, and students signing up for the first time are receiving weird errors and references to the Scholar service.

We’ll update this post as we have more information. Please post your experiences in the comments below to help us gauge the breadth and depth of the problem.

Update: We’ve been notified that the link for downloading the iPhone App on the BbSync page is incorrectly pointing to Google. Here’s the correct AppStore link

Update: This is submitted to Blackboard as ticket # 614334. This means nothing to anyone else, but fellow Blackboard admins will be able to link their Sync cases to ours.

Just a quick tip for instructors. Students really, REALLY appreciate it when you send them email when adding announcements to your course.

It’s dead simple too. When adding an announcement, simply check the box in Step 4. Then submit the announcement as usual.

Your students will (quietly) thank you for your consideration.

There is a known issue with WebDav in Windows XP. If you try to mount the WebDav folder as a network drive, Windows will continue to ask for your password even after you submit it correctly. After three such attempts, Windows will return a message similar to “The folder cannot be mounted because it is not a valid file”.

Blackboard is aware of the problem and is working on a solution. In the meanwhile the only workaround is to use a 3rd party software to mount the Blackboard WebDav folder.

I’m looking for suitable products to use at a reasonable cost. I’ve found three that look promising. We have not tested any of these nor do we offer support for them. These are offered as a convenience only.

If you are on Mac, CyberDuck looks promising, and it’s free
http://cyberduck.ch/

For Windows XP, NetDrive and WebDrive looks promising, NetDrive if free for individual use.
http://netdrive.net/

For both OSX and Windows, individual license costs around $60
http://webdrive.com/products/webdrive/index.html

If you do try any of these out, please let us know how they worked in the comments below.

The import/export process is superior to the course copy because the export/import process is much more stringent in fixing old course errors. Course copy will continue to replicate errors that were created due to Blackboard bugs from many years ago, while running your course through the export/import will fix those same errors, resulting in a cleaner, more consistent, properly working course.

• - Go into the control panel of the source course
• - Click on Export Course
• - Click to Export
• - Select the areas of the course to include in the Export. Click Submit.
• - In a few minutes, you should receive an email telling you the export is complete. Return to the course control panel, Export course
• - Click the link for the newly exported course to download it to your Desktop.

Now, for each course you want to copy into

• - Go into that course control panel
• - Click on Import Package
• - Find the file on your Desktop, and check the areas you want to import from the package. Click Submit.
• - In a few more minutes you should receive an email telling you the import is complete.

Nothing in life is perfect however. Blackboard caps the import upload at 250Mb to avoid crashing the server. If you find your export ZIP file is larger than 250Mb, please email us at help@usf.edu with the CourseID (eg EDE4325.901F08) of the source and destination course and we’ll do the export/import for you.

If time is of the essence and you’ve not had problems with your course in the past, you can also still perform Course Copy as before.

Please give this a try and let me know how it works.

Every time you visit Blackboard, there a friendly greeting awaiting you, something that the administration of USF thinks is important, timely, or interesting to students and faculty.

Part of the Welcome tab that everyone sees after logging it to Blackboard

In the past this message was static. I would put up the message, and it would remain until someone else came along with a new message. It was infrequently updated, and lost it’s impact as a tool for delivering information.

To mix things up, I wrote a new Blackboard extension I’m are calling Message of the Day. This tool maintains a small database of these messages, and randomly displays one each time the Welcome tab is reloaded. The randomization is weighted to that the most recent added messages have an increased chance of being chosen.

There is a function to create a priority message that, while present in the database, will always be chosen over all other messages. Useful when you need a particular message to take precedence and don’t want to take the time to modify the Welcome tab and replace the header module with a different module.

Some of the messages in the database at the time of capture. Two buttons make it easy to add new messages or add a priority message.

Each message is simple HTML. You can link to external images, use CSS to format the content, use A tags to link to outside locations. The tool ships with 6 simple icons that can be used to help ‘brand’ messages if you don’t already have an icon or image elsewhere.

A simple title helps organize messages in the database


Use html to your hearts content. Stock images included along with HTML code to make it dead simple to include

Stuff for Blackboard Admins
This is a new tool intended for the Blackboard administrators out there. Students and faculty probably won’t see or care other than to receive more and more interesting notifications. Administrators at other schools can find this utility in the Blackboard extensions catalog http://extensions.blackboard.com

The recommended way to deploy the module is as the header (via Tab -> Default Layout). This can also remain a regular module.

By popular request, we are pleased to release the first version of our Photo Roster tool. Available to course Instructors and organization Managers, this tool simply presents a roster of the students in your course along with basic contact information and a photograph supplied by the ID Card Center. The tool is available now by going into your course Control Panel and clicking on the Photo Roster link.

If a student as enabled privacy, or we don’t otherwise have a photo from the card center, a picture of Rocky the bull is used instead.

If you are wondering about the value of such a tool, please listen to this anecdote from a student

My undergraduate organic chemistry professor required all 100 students to submit to him a note-card after the first lecture. The note-card had to include a passport photo, name, hobbies and career interests. Amazingly, within two weeks he had memorized everything. When we raised our hands in class, he would address us by our first names. When we visited him during office hours, he would talk to us about our hobbies and if solicited, offer us career advice. This certainly made me feel very good that my professor actually CARES about me as a person!

Students

If you are concerned about having your photos available to the Instructor, Students have the right to have this suppressed. You can update your privacy settings in OASIS. The University Registrar provides an online tool for understanding and updating student privacy settings (https://www.registrar.usf.edu/privacy/).

USF considers photographic image to be “directory information” from a student privacy perspective.

For details, please see the USF Regulation USF2.0021 at:
http://usfweb2.usf.edu/usfgc/ogc%20web/currentregs/USF2-0021.htm

This is in compliance with state and federal privacy requirements.

Update Feb 18, 2009
A button was added to provide a Print View to the Photo Roster. Clicking the Print View button will open a new page that is formatted properly for easy printing.

Update Aug 12, 2009
I added two new print buttons to the Photo Roster. The first works much like the original print, showing the photo along with the name and email address of each student, just cleaned up a bit.

The second print button is a much more compact print with just the name and USFID of each student, no photos. This new print is more suitable for bringing to class and using to take attendance. Like always, the photo roster is an up-to-date listing of the students registered in your class.

I also added an image to help “brand” the tool. Enjoy