Today we applied new Java certificates in Blackboard. All users should clear their java AND browser cache to prevent future Blackboard problems. If you forget to clear the cache, it is possible you will receive a pop-up box that advises you that you are using an expired certificate. Make sure if you receive this message you clear both your java AND browser cache again.

How to clear your browser cache:
For most browser use CTRL + F5.
Click here for a browser specific overview.

Click here to see how to clear your Java cache.

After clearing the cahches, you will have to accept the new java certificate. There will be an automatic pop up, if you access a java applet inside Blackboard.

Attention Students! We need your help.

The Blackboard Product Development team is currently investigating social learning ideas with students. We have questions that cover ideas related to delivering information and content to students via a single interface (My Blackboard) that provides greater opportunities for user-to-user interactions. We want to understand your motivations for integrating social capabilities into the online learning experience. Please set aside about 15 minutes to tell us about yourself and answer some questions so we can better understand your motivations.

Survey Link: https://bbuxresearch.wufoo.com/forms/my-bb-design-ideas/

This survey will be available to you for the next week.

Since the upgrade this summer there are some confusions about the Blackboard Notifications possibilities. Please read this blogpost and find out how you can use the system to your own convenience.

Personal Preferences
Blackboard has a new notification system where every user can set his own preferences. There are two options: notifications by dashboard and notification by e-mail (notification on Mobile is not working yet and not known when it will be). You can select or deselect these settings for all or individual courses and for many parts of a course (announcements, assignments, tests, discussion board, etc.).  You can choose a daily digest or individual messages.

To check and change your settings go to ‘edit notification settings’:
• Click on the Notifications Dashboard Tab on MyTUDelft  or
• Go to ‘My places’ (top right) or
• Click on the link in the e-mail footer (be sure to be logged in in Blackboard)

NOTE: The bulk edit notification settings has a bug why, for some random users, it won’t work. Try the individual course settings if this happens. Blackboard is working on a fix.

The notifications will also be placed on the notifications dashboard and can be placed on your MyTUDelft homepage by adding the specific modules yourself.

Override User Notification Settings (important for Course/Organization leaders)
DO NOT USE THIS unless…..Users complain they receive double e-mails when an announcement is placed. The person that places the announcement most likely tagged the box ‘Override User Notification Settings’. The box “override User Notification Settings’ is meant for really very important things that happen within a day or two and most likely will not be seen in time when not e-mailed.

As I started this paragraph: do not use this option unless… At the moment the ‘override user notification setting’ box is tagged almost all the time. By doing this, students get fed up with the e-mails and the opposite happens: they will not read the messages.

Our advice is to tell the students that you actively use your Blackboard course and they are supposed to check the page regularly for updates. If they forget to check the page themselves they can use the notification settings to receive an e-mail if something changes. The excuse “I did not know” will not be accepted, because you placed it on the Blackboard page, were they could have found it. So in general: “do not use the override box’.

If you have a message they really cannot miss or is very short beforehand, you have two options:
• Send all course users an e-mail via Blackboard. If you have an important message which is not important for the course in general, you can also send an e-mail. (for instance room changes are important at the last minute, but do not have to stay in the course overview, so an e-mail will do as well).
• Use the override user notification settings: students that already receive a notification from the system can get a double message. One from Blackboard (if they have not received one already that day) and one with your e-mail address as a sender. But sometimes you have no other choice!

Blackboard is aware of the problems of SafeAssign. They have let know there are no short term corrections to queue length that can be performed by their support team at this time. 

SafeAssign Performance Advisory: Clients should expect turnaround times for papers submitted at 3-5 days from the time of submission

NOTE: please do not resubmit your report, this will make the performance issues only bigger

The maintennace upgrade planned on December 27th, will hopefully solve the problems.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Due to a bug, the Unenroll Tool was not available. We can happily announce that from now on the Unenroll Tool is available again. In some courses the tool is intentionally disabled. The Unenroll Tool can be found in the course menu under Tools.

Do note: If you unenroll yourself from a course, you can not enroll yourself again without any assistance from the instructor or E-Learning Support.

With the upgrade of Blackboard a lot of issues have been resolved, however some new issues have appeared or are still unsolved. This list will give you an overview of the most important issues. When available, a workaround is mentioned.

Sometimes if you come across an issue in Blackboard it is useful to try another browser. Firefox has the best result when using Blackboard

Unenroll tool unavailable
The unenroll tool is not available. Blackboard is working on a solution. It is possible to hide a course from your list (with the gear wheel on the top right of the courses module). Another option is to e-mail ELS and ask them to unenroll you from the course (make sure you give them your net-id and the correct course names).

Multiple File Upload
Multiple File upload is not working. Blackboard is trying to resolve this issue.
Workaround: use the web folder.

Announcements
Moving the announcements bar to bottom of the page causes the bar to disappear and the control panel to stop working.

The ‘My Announcements’ module in the homepage of a course is not showing Guests any announcements. Users not enrolled in a course (Guests) see an *Access Denied* or *There are no available items in this course* page when they enter a course allowing guest access and with announcements as the course entry point.

When using the text editor in Internet Explorer, lines created with the Line Tool display during editing, but not after saving.
Workaround: Use Firefox.

When following a course link in an announcement, the contextual menu is no longer available.
Workaround: Toggle *Edit Mode* to *OFF* and back to *ON*. Note the Action Link appears and the announcement can be edited.

All of the course announcements via e-mail are always sent by the administrator instead of the course instructor.

Slow performance on the announcements page when there are large numbers of announcements, students, and courses. (keep the announcements page clean by using date restrictions)

Grade Center
Error “Computing Non-Running Weighted Total”. When using a calculated column with Weighted Column and Running Total = NO, null grades are not properly accounted as 0, leading to incorrect results.

The Grade Center grid incorrectly displays group membership by graying out the wrong cells. This occurs when there are multiple Group Discussion Boards having gradable forums/threads.

Cannot extract assignment downloads in Internet Explorer. When an Instructor downloads a package of Assignments for grading, the .ZIP package does not open. This issue only occurs when the Instructor is using Windows Vista or Windows 7 in combination with Internet Explorer 7 or Internet Explorer 8.

Tab-delimited files (.xls) exported from the Grade Center do not insert tabs between each of the fields within a row. The file cannot then open properly in Excel.
Workaround: Download the column data in comma-delimited (.csv) format, and then import the file into Excel.

An error message appears when trying to change the Category for a test that is set to have the results hidden from the Grade Center (sometimes called a self-test). The Category can be successfully changed from the Column Organization page, but not from the "Edit Column Information" page.

Grade Center columns and column headers are misaligned in imported courses. For an imported course, columns in the Grade Center are shifted to the left of their column header, causing confusion when reading the information in the grid.

Observers are not able to view student grades. Observers receive an error message when attempting to view student grades.

Assessments
After enabling the B2 "Respondus Lockdown Browser," an error appears for tests with the character '&' in titles
Workaround: Do not use special characters (&#*, etc.) in document and assignment names.

If an assignment name has a hash symbol (#) in it, a user will encounter a 404 error when attempting to download submissions from the Gradecenter.
Workaround: Do not use special characters (&#*, etc.) in document and assignment names.

Internet Explorer cannot download from the Self and Peer Assessment tool.
Workaround: Use Firefox to download the file successfully.

When answering questions in a Self and Peer Assessment without using the Text Editor, the full text entered is missing when a Peer attempts to evaluate the entries.
When a user replaces an assignment draft with a file of the same name, neither of the files show up and both the history and the Grade Center do not display any files being attached.

If a student enters an assignment and then selects Cancel, this will be recorded in the Grade Center, which can cause issues if the Student has already made a submission for this Assignment.

Renaming a file link in a discussion results in the user being unable to open the file because the extension is gone.
When an instructor clears all attempts for a group assignment, members of the group are not able to resubmit the assignment.

Course Files
Uploading .ZIP files to course files fails if there are no files in the parent directory.
Workaround:  This problem only appears when the .ZIP package includes only folders in the top-level directory. If an individual file appears in the parent directory, along with the folders, the package will upload correctly.

Course/Organization
Assignments do not save a due date without a time being set. When creating an assignment, if an instructor sets a due date, but not a due time, and clicks Submit, it does not save the due date setting.

Discussion Board
Clicking 'Save Draft' within a graded Discussion Board forum results in error: courseId=unsetid

Discussion Boards does not open from Performance Dashboard. Rather than loading, the page spins and does not load.

Blogs
Instructors Are Unable to Access Graded Group Blogs and Journals After Unenrolling a Student Who Participated in These Tools.
Workaround: Make students unavailable rather than unenrolling them.

In the *Journals* or *Blogs* tools, if an instructor toggles *Edit Mode* from *ON* to *OFF* or *OFF* to *ON* while the *Instructions* are closed, the instructor cannot show the *Instructions* again, regardless of the *Edit Mode* position. Students can see the *Instructions*, but they are permanently hidden from instructors.

Journals
Journal Entries Do Not Appear In Order When Sorted By Last Modified Date* Journal entries appear to be randomly sorted when the user sorts by *Last Modified Date*, instead of being ordered by date order.

Calendar
When an instructor has set Date/Time restrictions on a content item or announcement, the dates are not being displayed correctly when viewed in the Calendar.
In the Control Panel/Course Tools/Course Calendar/View Month or My Calendar Module/more calendar events.../View Month, the days of the week are offset by one day and there are no dates in the Sunday column.
In the Content Item Edit mode, Date picker Calendar the days of the week are offset by one day and there are no dates displayed in the Saturday column.
This issue affects only IE 7 and IE 8 with compatibility mode turned ON
Workaround: Turn off Compatibility mode. Utilize optional browsers.

When adding a calendar event, if an instructor selects a date other than the current date and toggles *Edit Mode* to *OFF* or *ON*, the instructor is brought to the current date. An instructor must navigate back to the needed date to add information. Also, when *Edit Mode* is *OFF*, if an instructor clicks *Create Course Event* on the Action Bar, an error message is received.

Collaboration tools
After starting a Virtual Classroom session, the user has to click through several security warnings. Then, when a second user enters the session, the first user's Virtual Classroom window freezes, sometimes crashing the Java process resulting in a core dump.

A Wiki that Allows Students to Edit and Contains a Slideshare Mashup Will No Longer Display Properly After a Student Clicks Edit Wiki Content

Content System
Even when Public Read permission has been granted to a file that has been attached to a content item in a Guest Access-enabled content area, the file is inaccessible to the end-user causing the system to prompt the user to login.

Early Warning System
When instructors create an Early Warning Alert for students, the Early Warning will appear in the Alerts notification area for the instructor. The student will not see any indication of the Early Warning in his or her notifications module.

Notifications
Student notifications for past due and early warning system items do not display in alerts module.  The alerts module on the Notifications Dashboard, available to instructors and students, does not display notifications for Past Due and Early Warning System items.

Tools
HTML table cannot be edited in text editor.
Workaround: Click the button to Toggle HTML Source Mode, then click again, and you are able to edit the table.

There will be a Pronto upgrade. Blackboard provided us with the following information:

We would like to inform you about two upcoming upgrades for Wimba Pronto.

Server Upgrade on July 16, 2011

We will be performing a system upgrade on Saturday July 16, 2011 from 18.00 until July 17, 2011 06.00 hours. For more information, including port changes and technical details, click here.

The server upgrade includes new enhancements to support future capabilities as well as additional investments in our hosting infrastructure to ensure stability and improve performance as the service continues to grow. The servers will continue to be managed by the Blackboard Collaborate Hosting team.

During the upgrade, users will not be able to log into Pronto and syncs will continue as scheduled after this time.

Client Upgrade on July 24, 2011

We will perform a client upgrade on Monday July 25, 2011 at 03.00 hours. For more information about this release, click here.

Please note that this is a required upgrade. Therefore, all users must update their client software to continue to use Blackboard IM. Users will be notified to download the new client application and clearly guided through the process the first time they log in after the upgrade. The upgrade also includes branding changes to the client. More details are available in our Blackboard Collaborate Enterprise Instant Messaging brochure, which is posted in our Customer Upgrade Center.

Client Upgrade Center

We encourage you to actively review and participate in the Blackboard Collaborate Customer Upgrade Center at http://bbcollaborate11.coursesites.com to obtain more information about the release. We will update the Upgrade Center with new information on a regular basis.