Bb Down 5/27 for Upgrade: Resulting Changes

Bb 9.1 for Faculty

Blackboard will be unavailable on Friday, May 27th from 2:30 AM to 8:00 PM due to an upgrade to service pack 4.

What’s new with the installation of SP4?

Announcements:
New Announcements now appear directly below a repositionable bar. Priority Announcements can be moved above the bar so they always appear first in the list. Students do not see the bar. (Known Issue: If you move the repositionable bar to the bottom of the announcements, it will no longer be available. Also after doing this, the control panel may stop working. You can correct this by adding another announcement.)

Assessments:
Instructors now have the ability to view question numbers while building and editing assessments. Questions can be referenced by number throughout the assessment and can be used to sequence questions in an assessment. Also, feedback for each answer is now available for Multiple Answer questions.

Protect the Integrity of your Online Tests

Bb 9.1 Information for Faculty Just a reminder, there is information on the eLearning Services website about protecting the integrity of your tests by ensuring students cannot print or copy them. For instructions, click here. The direct link is here.

"Invalid HTML" Error Message

Bb 9.1 for Faculty

Have you received the following error in your Announcements?

To get rid of this error:

• Choose "Edit"
• Select the markup validation tool from the Visual Editor
• Click submit

This should get rid of the Invalid HTML error.

New Online Tutoring Service Now Available for Students

Information for Faculty and Online Students

eLearning Services would like to introduce you to an exciting new service that the college is piloting to help online students…

eLearning Services has partnered with SMARTHINKING to provide online tutoring in Math and Statistics, Spanish, Writing, Science and Business Studies (math tutoring is also available in Spanish).

The SMARTHINKING service supplements our existing academic support services by offering real-time online tutoring and homework help for core courses and skills. To view a complete list of tutoring subjects and time availability, see the SMARTHINKING Hours of Service page.

What is SMARTHINKING?
Smarthinking is an online tutoring service that provides tutoring in a variety of subjects, some of which are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. SMARTHINKING has a staff of over 1500 tutors worldwide who are trained to provide high quality learning assistance to students.

SMARTHINKING is not a homework answering or editing service. Instead, they strive to assist students in developing successful learning and problem-solving strategies that will help them succeed. Feel free to check out http://www.smarthinking.com and view the online demos to learn more.

How do students access SMARTHINKING?
The link to SMARTHINKING online tutoring service is found in the “Tools” area of each Blackboard course site. Note: only students can access SMARTHINKING services through the “Tools” area of Blackboard. Each student is allowed a maximum of three hours of tutoring. Students are encouraged to use this FREE service.

How can faculty learn more about SMARTHINKING?
Faculty interested in previewing the SMARTHINKING service, should contact eLearning Services and we will provide a faculty demo account. Also, SMARTHINKING representatives will be on campus in the coming weeks to meet with faculty to provide an overview and answer any questions regarding this online tutoring service. We will send an email with details about this soon.

Update: Blackboard YouTube Mashups Now Working

Bb 9.1 for Faculty

Good News! The YouTube Mashups are now working. You can once again search for and embed YouTube videos directly in your course site. You can also edit existing videos.

Update: Work Around for YouTube Videos & Emedded Video Issues

Bb 9.1 Information for Faculty

As indicated in a previous blog post, if you attempt to edit an existing embedded video in Bb, the video will no longer display correctly on your page, and all content below the video will disappear when viewed by a student. While researching this issue, Blackboard found another problem with other embedded videos in Blackboard.

The following are workarounds and updates issued by Blackboard regarding both of these issues:

If you use YouTube videos in your Bb course sites, part 1 applies to you. If you use ANY other videos in your Bb course site, part 2 applies to you.

Part 1 - YouTube videos
There are 3 methods to display video in Bb. BEFORE YOU TRY ANY OF THE STEPS BELOW, PLEASE CONFIRM WHETHER YOUR VIDEOS ARE WORKING.

The Solutions for the 3 methods of posting YouTube videos in Bb:

Method 1: Copy and paste the URL directly from YouTube and create within a content area.

Edit the content item that contains the YouTube video.

• Click the radio button for "open in a new window" = YES.
• By opening a new window, YouTube will now display. This is true for ALL links in ALL content types.
• Submit.

Method 2: Copy and Paste the embed code from YouTube.

• Find the video that you want on YouTube.
• Click the Embed button.
• Click the "use old embed code" check box that appears below the video
• Re-embed the code in your Bb course content area.
  

Part 2: Any video embedded in Blackboard

You may embed video code from almost any site, or video streaming server in your Bb content areas. While researching the YouTube problem described above, we found the following.

The Problem: if you attempt to edit an existing embedded video in Bb, the video will no longer display correctly on your page, and all content below the video will disappear when viewed by a student.

The Solution: place any text or other information that goes along with an embedded video in the content item the first time. Do not return to edit the content item that contains the video.
If you must return to edit and existing embedded video... delete the item and create it new.

Resolution:this issue is targeted to be fixed in Release 9.1 Service Pack 5 as bug number AS-155459. This maintenance release is scheduled for around April 2011. Given the breadth of clients impacted by this issue, we are investigation the option of a patch or an updated building block. If one is feasible we will publish it as a Support Bulletin on Behind the Blackboard and update this article accordingly.

Bb 9.1 Current Known Issues

Bb 9.1 for Faculty

Over the winter break, Blackboard Service Pack 2 was installed to correct some of the issues we encountered last semester in the new version of Blackboard. After the service pack was installed, several new issues have arisen:

1. Instructors are unable to add YouTube videos via "mashups" to their course content. Videos that had been previously attached should still work. This was caused by a change made by Google on January 24th. Blackboard is working on a patch to address this issue.

2. Permanent announcements do not stay at the top of the list. A workaround for this is to move priority announcments to the top.

3. Content that was copied from one course to another and contained linked documents, had broken links. A workaround for this is to relink the document. A patch was installed that fixed this for any future copy.

4. Cannot delete a Grade Center column after partial course copy. For example, an instructor establishes a graded blog in a course, then chooses to copy to an existing course by selecting to copy "Grade Center Columns and Settings" but not "Blogs." A column for the graded blog appears in the destination course but cannot be deleted even though there is no object in the course that is is attached to. This fix is planned for Service Pack 6.

eLearning Services will notify Blackboard users when these issues are resolved.