Upgrade:

On Thursday, August 20th Blackboard will be unavailable between midnight and noon as we perform our upgrade. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but feel it is necessary to do so at this time.

Foremost among the changes that you may see after the upgrade is a newly redesigned gradebook, which is now called ‘Grade Center’. The Grade Center uses a much more efficient interface, reminiscent of and excel spreadsheet, eliminating the extra clicking of ‘OK’ or “Submit’ buttons.  Upgrading also solves a number of compatibility issues with more recent web browsers, and will make the Blackboard experience more user friendly.

If you have any questions about the upgrade or Blackboard in general, please feel free to contact me at jgallawa@loyno.edu.

Workshops:

We have set the schedule for this fall’s Blackboard workshops for faculty and staff. We hope that you will be able to join us for one or more over the course of the week.

Monday, August 24th

10am: Blackboard Basics
Noon: Grade Center

Tuesday, August 25th

10am: Grade Center

Wednesday, August 26th

10am: Assessment in Blackboard
Noon: Blackboard Basics

Thursday, August 27th

Noon: Grade Center

Friday, August 28th

Noon: Blackboard basics
2pm: Assessment in Bb

All workshops will be held in the LI classroom on the second floor of Monroe Library, and no registration is necessary.

I hope to see you there!

As part of our routine maintenance, we will begin to remove courses from the Summer 2008 semester on July 27^th, 2009 and the Fall 2008 Semester on Aug 3^rd, 2009. If you have courses from either of these terms that you require to remain available on the Blackboard server, please contact the Blackboard Manager, Jonathan Gallaway at jgallawa@loyno.edu or at 504-864-7168.

Again this only concerns courses from the Summer and Fall of 2008. While no other courses are affected, please take time to look through your courses from all previous semesters, and if there are some that you no longer need to have live on Blackboard, please indicate to us which can now be removed.

While we take system backups, we encourage all teaching faculty to archive their courses for later use. For a tutorial on how to take an archive of your course visit the Blackboard Center on the Monroe Library Website at http://library.loyno.edu/researchtech/blackboard/tutorials.php?tutorial=faculty_archive_course.

Courses for the Fall of 2009 will be created on Monday, Aug 3^rd, and students will be enrolled into them on Monday, Aug 17^th.  If you need assistance copying material from previous semesters, combining multiple sections of courses that you are teaching, or have any questions about Blackboard or course procedures, you can, as always, contact Jonathan Gallaway or the Monroe Library.

Courses for this summer are now available on Blackboard to their respective faculty. If you are teaching a course over the summer and it isn’t appearing when you log in, please contact Jonathan Gallaway in the Monroe Library so we can remedy the situation.

Students will be enrolled univeristy wide on May 18th.

Did you know that you can now access your Blackboard account using your iPhone or iPod touch? Just yesterday the Blackboard Learn app became available at the app store.

Just download the app (its free), enter in the url for loyola’s blackboard server (loyno.blackboard.com) and your username and password, and you are well on your way to seeing what’s new, viewing class readings and keeping up with your classes even when you are away from the computer.

Don’t have an iPhone? Look for the Blackboard Sync app on Facebook and stay connected that way too.

We have been several reports over the last couple days of the Gradebook in Blackboard classes omitting grades. So far, it has only happened with grades manually entered into the system, and not with anything tied to an online test or assignment.

We are working closely with blackboard to uncover the cause of this error, and prevent it from occurring again in the future, but right now we need to assess what has been lost. So if you are using gradebook this semester, please go and check your courses to make sure that everything that you might have put into the gradebook is still there.

If you notice that some grades are missing, whether or not you have them backed up anywhere else, please contact me, Jonathan Gallaway at jgallawa@loyno.edu, so we can take steps to recover any lost information as well as to understand the scope of the problem. Since there is a limited window in which we can recover lost information from classes (30 days), please check your courses as soon as possible.

I apologize for any inconvience, but please be assured that we are doing everything in our power to address this issue.

Jonathan Gallaway

For more information on the anti-plagiarism service from Blackboard, Safeassign, and how to use it in your course see the Instructor’s Manual here. Information about Safeassign for students is also available, they should follow this link.

With Spring semester in full swing, It is time to start thinking about the second eight week (or “Z”) classes. Session Z courses officially begin, with some exceptions, on March 4th, 2009. If you are teaching one of these courses, it should already be listed in your course list on Blackboard. If you don’t see it there, contact me so we can be sure that you have the access you need.  Students will be enrolled into these classes on Monday March 2nd.

Some of you may have noticed blackboard was not available for a short time this afternoon. Because of some Database errors we were forced to perform an emergency restart of the service which took about five minutes.

I apologize profusely for any inconvenience, but I believe that database errors should stop now. If you happen to see any in the future, please let me know as soon as possible.

Thanks

Jonathan Gallaway

I have been hearing from a lot of students as well as faculty that they have been encountering this problem when trying to submit a file to a Blackboard assignment: The system allows you to browse for the file and attach it but when you click submit a pop-up warning tells you that your file is “Invalid”.

This is almost always caused by a browser incompatibility. Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8 (beta)  are not supported by our Blackboard environment at this time and will almost always throw this error up when trying to attach a file in Blackboard. If you encounter this, please try a different browser; Firefox 2 or IE 7 are both supported browsers and should work much better.

We are currently looking into a possible system upgrade to our Blackboard system that would support these browsers, but the downtime associated with such a change demands that it be done over the summer break.

So I know that it has been a while since my last post, and as soon as I get my random excuse generator up and running, I will let you know why.

Anyway, the Spring semester is warming up, and I just wanted to remind everyone that any questions about Blackboard can be directed to me at jgallawa@loyno.edu or to any one of the smiling faces behind the Learning Commons desk at the Monroe Library.

But until next time (and posts will be much more frequent, I swear),

Happy Blackboarding