Blackboard

Info

Blackboard is the University of RIchmond's course management system. Currently there are 2500+ courses on the system used for committees, training, academic and non academic courses.

Version

Current Version 7.0.404.2

Documentation

• University of Richmond Faculty Policies for Blackboard (Acrobat PDF)
• University of RIchmond Faculty Guide to Blackboard (Acrobat PDF)
• University of Richmond Student Guide to Blackboard (Acrobat PDF)
• Step-by-step instructions and video tutorials
• Information on the new version of Blackboard, coming in summer 2006

Server Maintenance Window

Friday nights 6-10 pm.

Feature Requests

Blackboard Feature Request Click the Blackboard Feature Request Link to email questions, enhancements or features you would like to see added to the application.

Remove course average from the student view.

Current Issues

Picture Rosters

Our Picture Rosters feature stops working occasionally. The result is that images of students are not available, with the default (darkened) image showing for all students in a class. The current workaround is for Bb system administrators to inactivate and re-activate the building block. We are researching this problem. (17 Aug 2006)

Update - Not sure what is going on here. Test roster looks fine. We copied over the Student Photographs folder from the plugins directory on test to production. So far so good. (21 Aug 2006)

Enrollment Permissions

We have only encountered this issue in one class so far. Students who are enrolled in a class do not see the class on their My Blackboard menu and cannot access the course when they navigate through the Courses tab (students are given an Access Denied error). Changing the student status to any other role makes the course available to the person. (15 Aug 2006)

Update: The issue has disappeared for the course in question, and we do not understand how or why. We are continuing to monitor. (21 Aug 2006)

Assignment Issue

An instructor was able to create an assignment without the required Title field. He is unable to remove or modify the item. Reported to Blackboard. (11 Aug 2006)

Large Survey - Results Issue

We have a survey with >500 respondents. When we attemtped to download the survey results we received Java errors and had to restart the server. Reported to Blackboard. (16 Aug 2006)

Class Search

Searching for a clss either on the Courses tab or in the System Administrator area using a text string (but not course ID or instructor strings) results in a page containing HTML and no search results. Reported to Blackboard. (11 Aug 2006)

FAQ

• FAQs are listed on the Blackboard help website

Most of the notes below and subsequent pages are written for Blackboard system administrators - people who are responsible for maintaining Blackboard. For information on using Blackboard, visit the Blackboard Resources page on the Information Services web site.

Blackboard Information for Administrators:

1. Blackboard wiki: on the ASUBB listserv, someone set up a Blackboard wiki for collaboration. The url is: http://bbwiki.clemson.edu/
2. Cool extensions for Blackboard for free - I just heard about two cool utilities for Blackboard from Jeff Nuckles (jnuckles@jjc.edu) at Joliet Junior College (http://www.jjc.edu/distance/) so I gave them a go on the test server. One is a discussion board grader that allows you to select a particular forum and a particular user and add an entry into the gradebook. It tells you automatically the number of messages and the number of replies a particular person had in a particular post. Definitely check it out. Also, I installed the Document unpackager - ROCKS!! I uploaded a zipped folder from my mac that contained multiple directories and levels of folders - it created the same folder structure in Blackboard. Great stuff! [**note - the .war and .zip are on dexter/liaisons/blackboard]. For more information, see Using the Document Unpackager.
3. Advanced Group Management Extension from Florida State University. This tool appears in the instructor's control panel and provides an alternative to the Blackboard Group Management features. It provides: 1) the display of all groups on one screen 2) the ability to view or modify membership assignments on one page 3) random assignment of students to groups 4) simultaneous multiple deletes of groups.. For more information, see Advanced Group Management Extension.

Blackboard Versions

• AppPack2
• AppPack3
• Blackboard 7

Using Course Templates

We're just now designing a process where courses taught by more than one instructor could use template courses in Blackboard so everyone has common content at the time the course is created. Visit the Blackboard Course Templates page for more information.

Blackboard Picture Class Rosters

A project we're working on for delivery in Spring 2006 is Blackboard Picture Class Rosters^?. Instructors of academic courses will be able to view a web page with photos of their students.

Blackboard Course Request Application

In April 2005 we launched a new Course Request site for Blackboard. The new site featured the integration of Banner data and used the Blackboard GUI interface to get the job done. For notes on how the application works, please visit the Blackboard Course Request Application page.

Other Notes for Administering Blackboard

• To calculate the percentage of University classes using Blackboard, we query Banner for a count of course sections for a given term, restricting the query to the Lecture schedule type (there is a statistically insignificant number of non-lecture courses in Blackboard) where the actual registrations are greater than zero. We query our Blackboard Course Request system for the count of Banner CRNs in Blackboard. Note that since faculty can combine Banner CRNs into one Blackboard course, we want to count the Banner CRNs and not just the Blackboard courses for a given term. Do the division and you get our percentage. For Spring 2006, it's 641 CRNs using Blackboard out of 892 Lecture sections with >0 enrollment.

Blackboard Test Plan

We're developing a comprehensive test plan for each upgrade. View the Blackboard Test Plan.

Tips and Tricks

Here are some tips or tricks that we've learned.

• Preventing Printing

-- KevinCreamer - 21 Aug 2006