myUSF Blackboard News

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

This week we look at podcast subscriptions. Here are the results:

Like most of our polls, this topic wasn’t randomly decided. It highlights a couple currents with which we are dealing. First there is iTunes U, an educational podcasting program of which USF participates in somewhat. We are also considering doing a Blackboard News / How-to series of podcasts and wanted to see what our potential market might be.

To me the wild speculation for this poll rests with the first two entries for 1-3 and 4-10. I expected to see 4-10 a larger selection than 1-3 since it seems that if you’ve started following podcasts, you would quickly branch out to half a dozen or more. I know this is the trend I followed: I started with The Instance and I quickly increased that to a dozen, and now I subscribe to about 30.

I wonder if this is indicative of the increased purchase of the iPhone. Perhaps a large number of those who select 1-3 are just getting into this new media. If so, this means we may be seeing a growth in podcast listeners. Besides the entertainment value, students will certainly find valuable study material in offerings from other Universities like Stanford which has a huge podcasting presence. I hope USF’s own iTunes U expands beyond our Library and College of Education soon so we can offer our own content to the world.

In late 2008 we deployed a suggestion box that gives students and instructors the opportunity to make suggestions directly to the administrators of myUSF, USF’s custom implementation of Blackboard. In the 6 months the suggestion box has been available we’ve received more than 400 suggestions, most of them good, many of them actionable items.

The prominence of Google Apps @ USF, the My Grade module, the Temporary Student account, these were all direct results of suggestions we’ve received.

The suggestion box is available in three places

As a module on the Welcome Tab

As a course tool in each courses Course Tools menu

As a control tool for instructors

We highly value the requests that come directly from you as they represent the day-to-day use of our system. Please tell us how we can make the system better for you.

As part of our preparation for the upcoming Fall semester, we will be applying Service Pack 5 for Blackboard 8. This should happen Friday morning August 14.

Here is a short list of issues that are addressed with Service Pack 5

Grade Center Improvements
In addition to stabilizing the Grade Center through resolving many outstanding bugs, the following improvements have been made to the Grade Center for this release:
• An automatic secondary sort on the first name when the primary sort is on the last name
• Smart Views function with multiple group selections
• The Grade Center can display more than 100 columns correctly

Content System Stability
In addition to the resolution of Critical and High priority bugs, the end-user experience has been improved by the resolution of eReserves and User Interface (UI) bugs. Other improvements include:
• Local files can be uploaded to a read only folder without permission errors
• Passes to view content maybe used in conjunction with Custom Authentication
• Users can upload content into another user’s folder if the permissions are set correctly

The Grade Center in Blackboard 8 & 9 uses a lot of javascript to make it work. When working with an SSL protected website like myUSF/Blackboard the default behavior of Internet Explorer 7 or 8 is to not cache images or javascript. This means that every time you visit the Grade Center, the entire stack of javascript has to be downloaded afresh. It’s not a lot of code, but it adds many seconds to the load time of the Grade Center.

I tried this in IE8 and it made a bit of a difference with a very small class. The setting is:

Tools: Internet Options: Advanced: Security: Do not save encrypted
pages to disk

Uncheck the box if it is checked.

I’ve been testing a really large class and I am amazed how much data is
downloaded. I guess I shouldn’t be. The class has 6,000 enrollees.

Unchecking that option cut about a 1/3 of the time required to load a Grade Center of 50 in IE8.

Courses are now available to students for the Fall 2009 semester.

Our second student straw poll inquires about the familiarity with the Google Apps used at USF. Sample size is 1,540.

Here are the results:

I’m not too surprised by these numbers. Experience tells me that most users aren’t the type to explore, so most students probably click on email, never noticing they have access to these other tools. I do wonder about the 11% that didn’t find any of the tools useful. Do students have no need for a robust online calendar or sharing documents easily?

As a result of this poll, we have added a new module to myUSF which more prominently displays links to the Google Calendar and and Docs.

Check it out and enjoy organizing your months and collaborating live on your group assignments! You can also access these tools directly via mail.usf.edu.

This is the first of a regular series called “Unscientific Poll!” You can expect wild extrapolations and blatantly drawn lines between correlation and causation. You’ve been warned. Hopefully, it’ll illicit at least a few “Hmm”s here and there.

Our first poll was asked of students (very loosely defined) with a sample size of 4,199.

Here are the results:

More than half of students would like to see some integration of social networking with myUSF, but a fair percentage (%43.58) just want it to serve up course content. Two of these, at least minimally, exist. There is a Facebook app as well as a somewhat limited iPhone app. At BBWorld this year, there were some very nice announcements regarding mobile access to Blackboard, so I think the iPhone application will improve greatly in the near future.

I’m surprised about the low count for Twitter. Is it difficult to imagine what that integration would be like? Maybe the adoption of Twitter among our students is very low or they don’t take it “seriously?”

Thanks to Texas Women’s University for the idea for this poll.