Dear students,

To clean up blackboard.tudelft.nl we will archive the courses of the academic year 2006/2007 and 2007/2008 to a new Blackboard archive server.

This action will not only free up storage space for future Blackboard courses, but it will also clean up the My Courses list for instructors and students.

If you need access to one of those courses you can contact e-Learning Support (ELS) via els@tudelft.nl or (015 27) 89194.

Willem van Valkenburg
Project leader Blackboard

Please note that Blackboard SafeAssign and Blackboard Scholar will be intermittently unavailable while undergoing maintenance on Saturday, October 10^th and Sunday, October 11^th.  This maintenance window is to update the hardware and network infrastructure of these products.

The systems are expected to be intermittently unavailable from morning (EST) on October 10^th through morning (EST) on October 11^th.  Users will not be able to submit assignments to Blackboard SafeAssign or access their Blackboard Scholar bookmarks during this maintenance period.  No action is required by users during this period of unavailability.

We have added a new building block Wimba Pronto. Pronto is a instant messaging and voice chat tool that allows students and instructors to spontaneously meet live online at any time to discuss their coursework. Pronto works with Blackboard to automatically populate students' contact lists with their classmates' names, thereby making it easy for students to spontaneously collaborate live online. After all, not all learning can be scheduled - it's often informal and unplanned.

While Pronto offers many similar features as other instant messaging tools such as AIM and Yahoo Instant Messenger, Pronto is unique to education because it integrates with Blackboard, thereby automatically populating each student's contact list with the names of every student in their classes and social organizations. With Pronto, students simply log on to their computers and instantly see who's online from their classes and organisations - without even logging into Blackboard. Each student can then spontaneously ask questions or make comments to classmates.

You can find Pronto on the Organisation tab or in a course under tools or communications. If you need help, you can download the manual.

Today we have installed the new version of the Volg+ module. This modules has two main improvements:

• Count of the credits you passed and the credit you still have to do.
• Statistics of the grades of you and your peers for and exam.

Example of the credit counts:

Example of the statistics:

Plagiarism has always been very difficult for institutions to measure and control, but since a flood of resources has become easily available through the Internet, the problem has grown exponentially. Students writing papers need only do a Web search on the topic for access to thousands of ideas, opinions and arguments, already thought through for them. Furthermore, students do not always understand how to properly cite and attribute borrowed content to maintain the originality of their work. Regardless of intent, plagiarism presents the very real dilemma of some students gaining unfair advantages over others. Unsurprisingly, institutions are still searching for effective methods of deterrence and prevention.*

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Today the new minorcommunities have been created. If you have registered yourself for a minor via minors.tudelft.nl, you should have a minor community in your list of organisations.

The minor coordinators are the community leaders and can add other leaders. If you need any help, you can contact ELS (els@tudelft.nl).

This week the Blackboard data (file system and databases) will be migrated to the new Storage Area Network (SAN). This new SAN should improve the reliability and performance of Blackboard.

Most of the migration is done while Blackboard is running, but we have to do some restarts of the application. This will happen on Wednesday morning and in the weekend. We try to keep the disruptions as short as possible; the disruptions will take an hour per time maximum.

A sign-up list is the electronic version of a paper 'sign-up sheet' on a noticeboard and can be added to any content area in a Blackboard course. It allows students to sign up for anything such as an activity where places are limited. You can use this tool to allow students to sign up for one-off events (such as workshops or revision sessions) or ongoing group events (such as seminars or tutorial groups).

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According to our webhuisstijl the links on a page should be light blue. But we got a lot of complaints about this in Blackboard. So we have decided to change this to dark grey with a blue mouse-over. I think this is an improvement for the eyes.