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

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.

A severe performance problem was identified with one of the modules attached to the default Courses and Organizations tabs supplied by Blackboard. The fix for this was to make the default Tab unavailable and replace it with a new tab that did not include the broken module. By removing this errant module we hope to improve the responsiveness and stability of the system as a whole.

An unfortunate side effect of this fix is that any modules or layout customizations made to your Courses or Organizations tab will need to be recreated. You can re-add any missing modules, such as the excellent My Courses Plus module or the entertaining Asteroids game by clicking the Modify Content button in the upper right.

After way too many years, we finally have a mechanism that allows Blackboard Instructors to view the course as a true student. Simply called “Create Temporary Student”, this tool creates a student account based on your own NetID and password and enrolls them into your Blackboard course.

Use the new temporary student feature in Blackboard to

• See your students’ view of your courses in Blackboard,
• Check that all of your course content is accessible to students and displays as you intend it to,
• Ensure that all assignments and associated points are in the Gradebook,
• Improve your students’ online learning experience by identifying any issues before the course is delivered.

Here’s the how to get started using Temporary Student

1. Log into Blackboard and go into a course in which you are an instructor.

2. In the Control Panel, go to Manage Tools, then click on Manage Building Block Tools.

3. Find the item Create Temporary Student, check it’s box, scroll down and Submit.

4. Go back to your Control Panel. You should now see an item in the Course Tools panel called Create Temporary Student. Click this.

The temporary student is almost ready for use. Follow the onscreen instructors for logging out of Blackboard and back in as your new student account.

Blackboard is offering Blackboard Sync, a Facebook application that delivers course information and updates from Blackboard to you inside Facebook. You can find out if you have a new assignment, grade, new forum posts, etc., without having to leave Facebook. Blackboard Sync also cross-references your courses’ Rosters with Facebook to make it easier to connect with your classmates through Facebook.

Except for Announcements, none of the actual course content is available in Facebook. Facebook users receive notifications about each new or updated piece of information, complete with a direct link to the item in their Blackboard course. Blackboard Sync will notify the student in Facebook that there is a new grade posted, and provide a link to their View My Grades page in the Blackboard coursesite. The student will still need to log into Blackboard to see that grade.

Each student can only see information specific to them for their own courses. They can’t share that information with Facebook Friends or Networks and there is no way for other students to access their information through Blackboard Sync.

Professors have the option to turn individual areas off for the Course site. If the professor does not want the students to see the Roster they can disable the Roster in the Blackboard Course Site and so on.

Students can set their Privacy options in OASIS so their email is not visible in Blackboard or the Blackboard Sync application. If the Roster is turned on and a student has downloaded the Blackboard Blackboard Sync application fellow students will be able to view another students Facebook page as if they were doing a normal search in Facebook. Students will still have the option in Facebook to set up their privacy settings.

The link to Bb Sync is on the myUSF tab. Once logged into myUSF, click on the tab and look for Bb Sync in the tools menu on the left.

Respondus Inc. has released Respondus 3.5.4e.

The 3.5.4e patch adds support for the importing of MS Word 2007 (.docx) files, support for version 8 of the Blackboard Learning System, enhanced “Save As” functions (including the new StudyMate Class Server XML format), and other enhancements and fixes. An overview of the enhancements is available at http://www.respondus.com/download/respondus35patch.shtml .

If Respondus 3.5 has already been installed, the easiest way to obtain the 3.5.4e update is to use the “Check for Update” feature in Respondus. Follow these steps:

* Start Respondus 3.5
* Select “Help” from the menu bar
* Click “Check for Update” (this requires a live Internet connection)
* Click “Get Update”
* Upon exiting the Respondus software, the update will automatically be applied

If you prefer to manually download and apply the Respondus 3.5.4e patch, go to http://www.respondus.com/download/respondus35patch.shtml and select the appropriate download link. As noted above, this page also provides a list of the items addressed with the patch.

Firefox 3 was released Tuesday June 17th. For the most part, Firefox 3 is compatible with myUSF Blackboard, but we have identified at least one significant area in which Firefox 3 fails.

When trying to upload an attachment to an assignment with Firefox 3, we get an error. A javascript popup displays “please enter a valid file” although the file is valid. This issue is being addressed in a service pack for version 7.3, but that has not been released yet. We will evaluate the service pack once it becomes available.

In the meanwhile, we recommend that you do not upgrade to Firefox 3 if you have need to upload files to Blackboard. Please remain on Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 6 or 7, or Safari 2. These are the only web browsers currently certified and supported by Blackboard.

Take this list for what it’s worth.

1. Should show new announcement for every week
2. The course is very well organized with logical structure of folders
and the contents are clear and clean. There should not be too much
course materials shown as text or graphics on one web page.
3. The students should be able to access the contents from the opening
page with easily followed links.
4. The course contents are engaging and are made up of various different
kinds of activities.
5. Active student/teacher interaction in Discussion Board
6. Gradebook demonstrates plenty of feedback
7. Teacher contact information is clear and obvious

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.

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