Thursday, January 7, 2010

Special Characters in Blackboard filenames cause lots of problems!

The use of special characters (i.e. "#", "+". "!"), can potentially cause problems in Blackboard.

You can run into problems if you use special characters in grade book columns, assignment names or file names. This includes faculty or students using these characters as part of a filename, faculty naming graded Assignments and Grade book columns.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) and Firefox 3.5 are not compatible with our version of Blackboard (version 7.3)

As you may already be aware due to student complaints or your own difficulties in accessing Blackboard, when using Blackboard 7.3 in the IE8 or Firefox 3.5 web browser a variety of problems can occur.

The most common errors are "Please enter a valid file" when trying to submit a file and students often have problems taking assessments.

We suggest you not use IE8 or Firefox 3.5 with our current version of Blackboard since they are not supported by Blackboard.

Since most people upgraded to IE8 based on a security update from Microsoft, it may not be avoidable.

There are two options to workaround this problem:
  • Use Mozilla Firefox 3.0 or below
  • Use IE7 or belowUse IE8 in Compatibility Mode