Bb Users,
Here’s a preview of some of the upcoming Blackboard training sessions. Check out our “Events” page for a complete listing or to register.
Upcoming Events
¨ 10/1: Keys to Creating More Engaging Bb Courses 1:00-2:00pm
¨ 10/2: Intro to Bb 3:30–4:30pm
¨ 10/6: Intro to Bb 10:00-11:00am
¨ 10/9: Grade Center 2:00-3:00pm
¨ 10/16: Intro to Bb 2:00-3:00pm
¨ 10/23: Grade Center 2:00-3:00pm
¨ 10/30: Intro to Bb 2:00-3:00pm
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Blackboard Users,
We are currently evaluating some alternatives to the icons we have been using for the last several years. If you see any changes in the coming weeks, please forgive the sudden change and note that you are not imagining it.
Thanks as always for your patience.
OLD NEW
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Somehow, the emails got delayed, but since they didn't generate any errors on the Blackboard server, we decided to wait a little longer for them to come through. And I think that they have (because all my test messages have been delivered).
If you have any reason to believe messages that you sent out this afternoon were still not delivered, please let me know, and thank you.
-Jennifer
__________________
JENNIFER CLISTER
Blackboard System Manager
University of Miami IAC
305-284-3949
________________________________________
From: UM Blackboard Announcements [BB@LISTSERV.MIAMI.EDU] On Behalf Of Clister, Jennifer R [jclister@MIAMI.EDU]
Sent: Friday, September 11, 2009 5:21 PM
To: BB@LISTSERV.MIAMI.EDU
Subject: [BB] Bb: Email Not Working
Bb Users,
Something is not working with the Blackboard email, but at this point I still don't know if the emails sent later this afternoon are on a delay and have not been received yet. I am troubleshooting this problem with Blackboard, but if you need to send out an email right away, you will have to copy and paste the emails:
1. Open an email application (like Outlook)
2. Go to the Control Panel and click "List/Modify Users" under "User Management"
3. Click the Search button to display all of your students
4. Hold down the Ctrl key and drag your mouse down the "Username" column to select the student emails
5. Right-click and Copy these emails and then Right-click and paste them into an email
6. If you have more than one page, do this for every page.
I apologize that this is a royal pain. Hopefully this problem will be resolved directly. Very soon.
-Jennifer
_____________________________________
JENNIFER CLISTER
Blackboard System Manager
University of Miami IAC
305-284-3949
[cid:image001.jpg@01CA3304.3F018370]
Bb Users,
Something is not working with the Blackboard email, but at this point I still don’t know if the emails sent later this afternoon are on a delay and have not been received yet. I am troubleshooting this problem with Blackboard, but if you need to send out an email right away, you will have to copy and paste the emails:
I apologize that this is a royal pain. Hopefully this problem will be resolved directly. Very soon.
-Jennifer
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Bb Users,
We are trying a new kind of training activity. We have paid to participate (as a group) in a Webinar with a professional online instructor/designer (whose credentials are below) on how to make your Blackboard course more engaging to students. We will participate as a group from the Faculty Exploratory. If you’re interested, we only ask that you register so that we don’t overcrowd the Exploratory. If interest is high, we may be able to find a bigger room. Register here.
Here is all the info:
Today's students live in an email and Facebook world with their laptops practically attached to their fingertips. They expect to seamlessly transition from class to home, library, wherever, whenever. Blackboard's collaborative teaching and learning tools can help bridge the gap from classroom to anytime, anywhere- but navigating these tools can be confusing. Join us for a 60 minute webinar where you and your colleagues will discover:
This practical 60-minute, webinar will provide you and your colleagues with the basics of designing and developing a course in the Blackboard learning management system.
Jason Rhode, Ph.D., is the Assistant Director of the Faculty Development and
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Bb Users,
I have updated our Blog and Wiki tools. Here are some of the new features. If you have any problems with any of these tools, please let me know or submit a help desk ticket.
Also, if you experience a problem with the
Welcome back!
-Jennifer
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Bb Users,
This is just a reminder that Blackboard will be down on Saturday 8/15 starting at 12:00am. The downtime *should* only be 12 hours, but please avoid situations where you would depend upon service being restored before 5pm – just to be safe.
This is a small upgrade. We will still be using the same version of Blackboard (version 8), but there are some small security vulnerabilities and enhancements that need to be made. The most noticeable enhancement is to the grade center. Now when two students have the same last name, their first names will also be alphabetized.
Taking the time to keep our system up-to-date with Blackboard's updates and patches is important so that we can avoid future problems and also save time troubleshooting problems because we have already applied Blackboard's newest updates and patches.
Hopefully one day we will not have to experience a service interruption while these updates are being performed.
If you have further questions, please email me: jclister@miami.edu
Thank you for your continued patience and feedback.
-Jennifer
PS – We are scheduling lots of back-to-school Blackboard training sessions. Click the IAC tree and then the “Events” link to register.
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Bb Users,
Here are a few quick announcements as we start preparing for the Fall Semester…
We will be doing a small upgrade to Blackboard beginning at 12:00am on Saturday, 8/15. Blackboard has scheduled 12 hours of downtime, but I urge you to play it safe and avoid depending on using Blackboard Saturday afternoon. We performed this upgrade on a replica of our production server, and it took the expected 12 hours, but experience has taught me to be overly conservative rather than overly optimistic when it comes to upgrades.
The newest version of the Wimba Voice Tools have been installed. The enhancements in this version are to the Voice Boards.
¨ Faculty can now filter the posts by user.
¨ There is also an option to grade the voice boards. This means that you can enter a number of possible points, and a grade column will be automatically created in the grade center. There will also be a “Grade this board” button visible at the top of the Voice board page.
If you would like to collapse your Blackboard sites into one course site or would like to add an additional site that include all of the students in your courses, let us know. Here’s a shortcut to filling out a Course Merge Request Ticket.
We updated the UM branding in the top left corner, and replaced the small cluster of links in the top right corner with an
Do you know someone who should be receiving these emails? Please pass this information on to them. Join the Bb Mailing list.
We will be doing several Into to Blackboard and Grade Center Basics training sessions in August. Please watch the Announcements section for specific dates and times.
Blackboard was able to replace the switches that caused our outage on July 13th. The maintenance ended at about 3:30pm.
Please let me know if you have any questions, Thank you for your patience and feedback, and I look forward to working with you throughout the fall semester.
-Jennifer
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Bb Users,
I think we fixed this problem.
It seems there was a problem with some of our plug-ins, which we re-activate. I think that we have fixed the problem, but if you see any errors, please let me know right away.
I’m going to continue to work with Blackboard to figure out why this problem occurred, but in the meantime, I think it is working correctly now.
I apologize for the inconvenience, and appreciate your feedback to help solving these problems as quickly as possible.
-Jennifer
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305-284-3949
From: UM Blackboard Announcements [mailto:
Sent: Tuesday, August 04, 2009 2:34 PM
To:
Subject: [BB] Error logging in to Blackboard?
Bb Users,
A few people are experiencing an error when they login to Blackboard. You can see that error below. You can still access your courses/organizations via the tabs, but the home page tab displays this error:
Error:
We are trying to figure out what causes the error, but the temporary fix that we found requires that you clear your browser cookies – and here is how you do that in IE and Firefox.
If you need assistance, please call the
Clearing Cookies in Internet Explorer:
Clearing Cookies in Firefox:
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Bb Users,
A few people are experiencing an error when they login to Blackboard. You can see that error below. You can still access your courses/organizations via the tabs, but the home page tab displays this error:
Error:
We are trying to figure out what causes the error, but the temporary fix that we found requires that you clear your browser cookies – and here is how you do that in IE and Firefox.
If you need assistance, please call the Blackboard Help Desk: 305-284-3949.
Clearing Cookies in Internet Explorer:
Clearing Cookies in Firefox:
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Bb Users,
Blackboard is performing emergency maintenance to replace a network switch in response to the outage we experienced on July 13th. That outage affected all of their hosted clients at their “Northern Virginia Data Center 2” facility.
The maintenance will begin at 8:00am and is expected to finish by 11:00pm. Blackboard will remain available, but periodic service interruptions may occur during that time.
They will be sending me updates, and if they provide anything beyond “We are still working…things are going well…” I will pass that information along.
I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and the short notice. If you would like to read Blackboard’s announcement for more details regarding what they are doing, please see below.
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Tue 7/28/2009 5:39 PM
General Announcement: Dear Valued Customer,
Subject: Emergency maintenance notification for Saturday, August 1st 2009 for
Date: Saturday, August 1st, 2009
Start time: 08:00 US Eastern
Estimated end time: 22:00 US Eastern
Services: All clients at Northern Virginia Data Center 2 (VA2)
Type of work: Network Switch Replacement
Purpose of work: After action to July 13th network event.
Impact of work:
On Monday, July 13th, 2009, we experienced a data center-wide outage as a result of a failing network switch. Through a coordinated effort with our vendor, we determined that a full switch replacement is the best course of action to increase reliability and stability at our Northern Virginia Data Center 2 (VA2). As this device is a part of our core network infrastructure, we require an extended emergency maintenance window to perform the hardware replacement.
This emergency maintenance is planned for Saturday, August 1st 2009, and the work will start at 08:00 hrs US Eastern and is expected to continue until 22:00 hrs US Eastern. As a precaution, we advise that you inform your faculty and students to expect intermittent service interruptions during this maintenance window. We will take every precaution to keep the work seamless and maintain system availability.
We understand that this is short notice and unfortunately we must perform this maintenance.
Bb Users,
For those who are interested in what happened to cause Blackboard to go down unexpectedly last Monday afternoon (7/13), here is a brief description:
Blackboard noticed some network slowdown, and while troubleshooting they realized that the core back end switches were not functioning properly. They brought out the vendor and their own team of engineers to stabilize the network – which they did. They are still uncertain what the root cause of the problem was, but as a precaution they are planning on replacing the switches during one of our scheduled maintenance windows (between 1am and 7am on some Saturday mornings). They are still working on a specific action plan, and if you are interested in hearing the specifics when they send it along, please let me know.
There were MANY schools affected by this outage, and probably around another 30 or so (including us) that had to have their databases rebooted even after service was restored before we could access our courses.
Thank you again for your patience.
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Our Blackboard system was restored within the last hour or so, but access to individual courses was just restored. There were approximately 30 schools who were still experiencing database errors when attempting to access individual courses requiring those databases to be restarted one-by-one.
If you are still experiencing problems, please try closing and restarting your browser.
If you continue to experience problems, please contact the help desk.
If you have anything you would really like me to say to the people at Blackboard while I am at the Blackboard World conference this week, please send them to me, and I'll do my best to find someone to listen.
As always, thank you for your patience.
-Jennifer
__________________
JENNIFER CLISTER
Blackboard System Manager
University of Miami IAC
305-284-3949
________________________________________
From: UM Blackboard Announcements [BB@LISTSERV.MIAMI.EDU] On Behalf Of Vilberg, William R. [bill.vilberg@MIAMI.EDU]
Sent: Monday, July 13, 2009 4:01 PM
To: BB@LISTSERV.MIAMI.EDU
Subject: [BB] Status: UP
It appears that Blackboard is up again, after a 2 hour 30 minute
outage for us and 200 other schools. The BbWorld09 annual conference
starts tommorow, so Jennifer should come back with some interesting
stories because of this outage.
Bill Vilberg
[See http://three.sentenc.es]
Bill Vilberg
[See http://three.sentenc.es]
Bill Vilberg
Bb Users,
Blackboard is doing some maintenance that will make Blackboard temporarily unavailable at times between 3:00am and 8:00am on Friday, May 22.
After that, if you have problems, please create a ticket.
Thank you as always, and have a nice, long weekend.
-Jennifer
____________________________________
JENNIFER CLISTER
Blackboard System Manager
305-284-3949
It's that time of year again. If you need any help cleaning up this semester's grade centers, or getting ready for the summer sessions, please stop by my office hours on Thursday at 11. I'll stick around as long as there are people there who need help.
if you haven't been there, the Faculty Exploratory is a great computer lab to sit and work in. It's located in Richter Library on the 3rd floor. Make a right when you come out of the elevator.
If I don't see you, have a great summer.
-Jennifer
__________________
JENNIFER CLISTER
Blackboard System Manager
University of Miami IAC
305-284-3949
Bb Users,
Blackboard needs to do some emergency maintenance, and we *may* experience intermittent downtime between 3:00 and 5:00am Wednesday morning (May 6th).
If you have any problems, please create a ticket with our
In addition, with the end-of-semester upon us, I will be holding office hours in the Faculty Exploratory in case you need help getting your grade centers finalized – or setting up your summer courses. Please watch the announcements on the Blackboard home page for dates and times.
Thank you,
Jennifer
___________________________
305-284-3949
I have gotten some inquiries about the STUDENT_ID column in the grade center and why it doesn't display student Cnumbers -- because that would really be helpful.
Well, I have figured out how to make that happen and will be working on getting that data populated over the next week or two (other issues permitting). So don't be alarmed if you see numbers start to appear there.
Thank you for the suggestion.
Also, if you have hidden that column (or would like to hide/unhide that column) in your grade center, here's how you do it:
[cid:image001.jpg@01C9B44D.E61754E0]
[cid:image002.jpg@01C9B44D.E61754E0]
Thank you again for the suggestion.
___________________________
JENNIFER CLISTER
Blackboard System Manager
University of Miami IAC
305-284-3949
[cid:image003.jpg@01C9B44D.820C5EA0]
