I hate to report this, but there seem to be a serious problem in the Blackboard system that may cause all of your content to disappear or your course site to become completely unavailable, even to me. I have only had it reported in two sites, so far, but Blackboard is unable to identify the cause and reports that they have seen it at other universities.
As a precaution I encourage you to go to the Control Panel of each of your courses and use the Archive Course link to create a zip file on your computer with everything in it from your course as it currently exists. If anything happens we can use that backup to restore things the way they are right now. If you are using the gradebook you should also go to it and export it so that you will have multiple copies of any grades you have posted.
I fully subscribe to Keller's ARCS model of motivation. The four things that are necessary to motivate you to use Blackboard are Awareness that it exists and what it can do, Relevance to what you are trying to accomplish, Confidence both in the system itself and in your ability to use it, and Satisfaction after using it that it was worth the effort. This problem is not helping with the confidence scores, but I believe it is imperative that you know about any issue that might affect your teaching of your classes. I will continue to work with Blackboard to try to identify the problem and resolve it.
Bill Vilberg
305-284-3949 (work); 786-218-3052 (cell); 305-255-9138 (home)
