myUSF Blackboard News

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.

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:

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:

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.

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.

Full audits were conducted of the Release 6.1 and 7.1 of the Blackboard Academic Suite. The results of the audit outlined compliance for the Academic Suite based on both Section 508 and WAI standards.

The servers hosting SafeAssign at Blackboard Inc. are currently experiencing unscheduled downtime. During this time, the SafeAssign tool will not load and you may experience a delay in the processing time for reports. Our first report of this problem was around 7:00 p.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.

Update:As of 9:10 p.m. EDT access to the SafeAssign service has been restored.

What happened is that OASIS / Banner was being updated this weekend, and thanks to a bug in Blackboard, the lack data was processed incorrectly resulting in all courses being disabled for a few hours Saturday Sunday. From roughly 5:30 to 10:30am Saturday Sunday courses were not available to Student or Instructors. Course contents were not affected by the error, no data was lost as a result of this incident.

The title was corrected to read Sunday, not Saturday. The problem happened Sunday morning, and affected courses between 5:30am and 10:30am. Sorry about any confusion.

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.

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.

Each semester we get a handful of questions about why Test Links in content areas aren’t included when the course is copied. I ran a series of tests to see what is and is not copied for certain combinations of Course Copy Options.

To make sure Test Links are copied, you must select Course Copy options for Content, Text/Surveys/Pools, and Gradebook Items.

1) Content (only)
Most all content items were copied.
Safe Assignment links were copied, but course will need synchronization.
No Test/Survey Links or Assignments were copied.
The Gradebook is empty.

4) Content & Test/Survey/Pools & Gradebook Items
All test, surveys, and pools are copied into Test Manager/Pool Manager.
All content items were copied.
Including links to Tests/Surveys, and Assignments.
The Gradebook is populated with columns.
Safe Assignment links were copied, but course will need synchronization.

The moral of the story is to use copy option 4 to copy a complete, working version of your course including links to tests.

If you have any questions about this or any other aspect of myUSF Blackboard, please let us know by emailing myusf@acomp.usf.edu or calling the Academic Computing Helpdesk at 974-1222.