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On September 23 we sent out a round of email stating that courses created in 2004 and earlier would be removed from the system in 30 days. The message read as follows:
Professor @@lname,
We apologize for the blast of emails today. We are cleaning out 4 semesters of old courses,
and our tool only [...]
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The Blackboard system experienced an operating system kernel error on one server which cascaded and was not handled properly by the cluster, resulting in Blackboard being unavailable for about 45 minutes, Tuesday, September 22, from approximately 9:30-10:15pm. No data was lost as a result of this outage.
We apologize for any inconvenience this [...]
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Last year we released the ability for departments and advisers to communicate with your constituents. We’ve greatly expanded the options for how those sites can be automatically populated with students. In particular, we can now identify students based on:
- Their College, department, major, concentration, or degree code
- Their education level (Freshmen, Sophomore, Undergrad, [...]
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The United States is slowly falling in line with the majority of the Internet connected world and moving to web browsing on their cell phone. Naturally, our students are at least representative of this trend if not slightly skewed even more in the direction of mobile internet use. Blackboard currently supports a limited [...]
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If you are a friend of Google Calendars, and an owner of a Blackboard course or Organization, this will be useful.
Within Google Calendar is a great feature for embedding calendars on other web pages. As you update your Google Calendar, the web page with the embedded calendar is automatically updated. And what is [...]
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It’s been 4 years since this was first posted, enjoy
If your looking for the games recently*cough* added to myUSF / Blackboard, here’s how to find them.
Click on your Welcome tab
Click the Modify Contents button in the upper right side of the frame.
Scroll down a bit until you find the modules you are looking for. [...]
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There is a problem with Internet Explorer 8 and External Links in Blackboard. If you create a link in Blackboard to a non-SSL site (one that begins with http:// rather than https://), IE8 will try to protect you from potentially harmful 3rd party websites by asking, “Do you only want to display content [...]
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The Blackboard sync service that provides for the Facebook and iPhone app integration with USF Blackboard is having problems now. Students htat have already signed up for the service are not receiving updates, and students signing up for the first time are receiving weird errors and references to the Scholar service.
We’ll update this post [...]
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Just a quick tip for instructors. Students really, REALLY appreciate it when you send them email when adding announcements to your course.
It’s dead simple too. When adding an announcement, simply check the box in Step 4. Then submit the announcement as usual.
Your students will (quietly) thank you for your consideration.
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There is a known issue with WebDav in Windows XP. If you try to mount the WebDav folder as a network drive, Windows will continue to ask for your password even after you submit it correctly. After three such attempts, Windows will return a message similar to “The folder cannot be mounted [...]
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The import/export process is superior to the course copy because the export/import process is much more stringent in fixing old course errors. Course copy will continue to replicate errors that were created due to Blackboard bugs from many years ago, while running your course through the export/import will fix those same errors, resulting in [...]
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Every time you visit Blackboard, there a friendly greeting awaiting you, something that the administration of USF thinks is important, timely, or interesting to students and faculty.
Part of the Welcome tab that everyone sees after logging it to Blackboard
In the past this message was static. I would put up the message, and it would [...]
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On June 3, between 5-7pm MyUSF experienced a hardware failure which effected the performance and availability for some users until around 11pm. The hardware problem has also caused course content from Spring 2009 and Content Collection items to become unavailable. Current Summer 2009 content should not have been affected.
The nature of [...]
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updated May 14
Internet Explorer 8 is now generally available, but problems still persist.
In order to use IE8 with Blackboard, you will need to change the compatibility mode of IE8 to emulate IE7
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/features/enhanced-navigation.aspx
It’s still in beta, so it should come as no surprise to anyone who uses it, but there are known problems with [...]
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There are a couple of course roles available in Blackboard. I’ll do my best to explain them and how they come to pass at USF.
The most privileged role is called Instructor. The Instructor role has full access to the course in Blackboard. They can change the roles(promote or demote) of other people [...]
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The Blackboard Grade Center benefits from having a lot of vertical screen space in which to display rows of students. The web browser uses a lot of that space with tool bars, address bars, and other bars. In Windows, you can temporarily reclaim that space by going into FullScreen mode. In [...]
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Update 1:31pm: Blackboard is back to full service levels.
A system error occurred overnight March 4th resulting in Blackboard being completely unavailable from about 7:30-8:30am. Resolving the error introduced an instability in the shared file system that resulted in a bottleneck that backed everything up in Blackboard. The result was [...]
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In previous versions of Blackboard, adding extra credit to your Gradebook was straightforward. Add a zero point column to the gradebook, and add points to it which would be added to the Total without changing the basis.
In Blackboard 8, the same method works, but due to a bug in the Grade Center, a little [...]
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By popular request, a new module has been added to make it easier for students to see if new grades have been posted, and to quickly get to their grades in all courses.
Everyone should currently see the My Grades module on the Welcome Tab, as soon as you log in. This module shows [...]
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If you are a department or adviser looking for a new way to maintain communication with your constituents, we are pleased to offer Blackboard Organizations populated with the students for every College, Department, and Major in OASIS Banner. We’ve set up an automatic process that reads students College, Department, and Major codes from [...]
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In addition to the Online Documentation we’ve created, available at
http://wiki.acomp.usf.edu/index.php/Grade_Center
Blackboard has produced a number of Flash videos showcasing some of the more advanced things you can do with the new Grade Center. Check em out.
Grade Center: Determining Grades and Exemptions
Grade Center: Analyzing Grades (differentiated instruction orientation )
Grade Center: Customizing the Grade [...]
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The upgrade to Blackboard 8 provides Instructors with a powerful new Grade Center to manage grading in a course. This Grade Center replaces the current gradebook. If you are currently using the Blackboard gradebook, the new Grade Center can look different at first, but it improves highly on its predecessor.
Online Documentation is available [...]
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The upgrade has been approved by the Courseware Advisory Committee, all technical concerns have been addressed, the documentation has been created, and we are go for upgrade to Blackboard 8.
The upgrade will begin at 12:01 a.m. on Monday December 29th, and will be done by the end of business Tuesday December 30th. [...]
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We talked a while ago about a web page you can use to submit suggestions directly to Blackboard on how they can improve their product. Your ideas are being heard. At last check they had received almost 200 suggestions from USF. Good job.
Additionally, the recently completed Photo Roster tool [...]
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By popular request, we are pleased to release the first version of our Photo Roster tool. Available to course Instructors and organization Managers, this tool simply presents a roster of the students in your course along with basic contact information and a photograph supplied by the ID Card Center. The tool is available [...]
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It’s still in beta, so it should come as no surprise to anyone who uses it, but there are known problems with IE8 Beta and Blackboard.
The following are known issues with IE 8 Beta
Students trying to upload files to an Assignment will receive an error message
“Please submit a valid file”
When taking a timed quiz, the [...]
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Blackboard’s assessment engine is a powerful set of tools that allow instructors to create and deploy tests to students. Blackboard provides a number of options that can restrict the ways in which students are able to take a test and reduce the incidence of cheating. The more restrictive the test, the less likely [...]
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MyUSF is currently being considered for an upgrade to Blackboard version 8. This version would bring an awesome new Grade Center to Instructors allowing them more flexible control over how they manage grades.
This upgrade is currently penciled in for December 29th, but that date is under review by a number of parties. This [...]
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After way to many years, we finally have a mechanism that allows Blackboard Instructors to view the course as a true student. Simply called “Create Temporary Student”, this tool creates a student account based on your own NetID and password and enrolls them into your Blackboard course.
Use the new temporary student [...]
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Blackboard is offering Blackboard Sync, a Facebook application that delivers course information and updates from Blackboard to you inside Facebook. You can find out if you have a new assignment, grade, new forum posts, etc., without having to leave Facebook. Blackboard Sync also cross-references your courses’ Rosters with Facebook to make it [...]
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Processing began for student enrollments for Fall courses in Blackboard. Students registered for Fall courses in OASIS/Banner should now be enrolled in those courses in Blackboard. The Blackboard course sites are available, and students are now able to view and interact with them.
Happy Fall Semester.
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Respondus Inc. has released Respondus 3.5.4e.
The 3.5.4e patch adds support for the importing of MS Word 2007 (.docx) files, support for version 8 of the Blackboard Learning System, enhanced “Save As” functions (including the new StudyMate Class Server XML format), and other enhancements and fixes. An overview of the enhancements is available at http://www.respondus.com/download/respondus35patch.shtml [...]
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Between approximately 7am and 9am, Friday June 27, Blackboard errors were seen when any of the following actions were performed:
Post a message to a discussion board
Take a test
Upload an assignment
On Friday, June 27 During the scheduled maintenance window, a fix was applied to correct a minor performance problem. During the application of this fix, [...]
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Firefox 3 was released Tuesday June 17th. For the most part, Firefox 3 is compatible with myUSF Blackboard, but we have identified at least one significant area in which Firefox 3 fails.
When trying to upload an attachment to an assignment with Firefox 3, we get an error. [...]
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A power failure in one of the servers caused the Blackboard application to become non-responsive beginning about 5:30pm, April 20th. Service was restored by 6:15pm.
No data was lost as a result of this interruption. In progress tests may have not submitted properly. Please consult with your instructor if problems with Blackboard were [...]
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The backup generator that services the Tampa Campus Library and server room in which the Blackboard servers reside is undergoing an emergency repair to replace the automatic failover switch. To facilitate this repair, electricity to the server room will be disconnected for approximately 90 minutes, beginning at 12 :01am Friday March 7th.
To [...]
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Beginning around 9:30am, Monday Feb 11, the Brighthouse network servicing the Blackboard SafeAssign data center in Virginia stopped serving data. As a result of this outage, anybody using Brighthouse as their ISP is unable to submit documents to SafeAssign via Blackboard.
The only workaround at this time is to submit documents from a [...]
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Take this list for what it’s worth.
1. Should show new announcement for every week
2. The course is very well organized with logical structure of folders
and the contents are clear and clean. There should not be too much
course materials shown as text or graphics on one web page.
3. The students should be able to access the [...]
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myUSF Service Reduction 12/18
From approximately 2:15 pm to 2:45 pm some users experienced excessive wait time when submitting grades or trying to access myUSF. For about 10 minutes within this time frame we had a complete service outage for myUSF.
All grades submitted during this time (around 150) were processed by around 3 pm. [...]
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The servers hosting SafeAssign at Blackboard Inc. are currently experiencing unscheduled downtime. During this time, the SafeAssign tool will return an error message and you may experience a delay in the processing time for reports. Our first report of this problem was around 8:00 a.m. EDT.
Please note: this effects only those assignments which utilize the [...]
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Now through the end of the semester, Academic Computing is hosting walk-in clinics where you can ask any questions you have related to Blackboard at USF. There will be two sessions each week, starting on November 2:
Tuesday
4:30pm - 7:00pm
Friday
11:00am - 2:00pm
Clinics will be held in LIB 618, on the 6th floor of the Tampa campus [...]
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If a test is setup with a time limit, students taking the test will see a timer float in the upper right corner of the test window. In recent versions of the IE web browser, a bug was introduced by Microsoft which causes the page to scroll very slowly.
A [...]
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Full audits were conducted of the Release 6.1 and 7.1 of the Blackboard Academic Suite. The results of the audit outlined compliance for the Academic Suite based on both Section 508 and WAI standards.
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The servers hosting SafeAssign at Blackboard Inc. are currently experiencing unscheduled downtime. During this time, the SafeAssign tool will not load and you may experience a delay in the processing time for reports. Our first report of this problem was around 7:00 p.m. EDT.
Please note: this effects only those assignments which utilize the [...]
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What happened is that OASIS / Banner was being updated this weekend, and thanks to a bug in Blackboard, the lack data was processed incorrectly resulting in all courses being disabled for a few hours Saturday Sunday. From roughly 5:30 to 10:30am Saturday Sunday courses were not available to Student or Instructors. Course [...]
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As we are committed to make improvements as our resources allow, we have resolved some of the performance issues we were experiencing and response times have been reduced considerably.
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For the last 4 years we have seen increases in Blackboard use 20-30% each year. We have also seen an increase in the complexity of how faculty use Blackboard. More are using advanced features like the Discussion Board or the Gradebook than have ever before. Given the budget reductions, new policies have [...]
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The version of the Virtual Classroom / Lightweight Chat included in Blackboard 7.3 is not currently compatible with Java 6. We are planning to patch Blackboard within the next two weeks to correct this issue, but for now, if you have troubles loading the Virtual Classroom, please check if you are using Java 6. [...]
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The Safe Assign migration has finally completed, and Course Copy is
now safe to use across all courses. If you have any questions about
Safe Assign, Course Copy, or any other aspects of myUSF/Blackboard,
please email myusf@acomp.usf.edu.
Thank you for your patience during this process
Academic Computing
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This updated Content Player Blackboard Building Block™ provides improved support for SCORM 2004 v2 content including:
• Improved Content Player interactions with Gradebook
• Improved handling of Flow based packages
• Improved testing using packages provided by a number of content publishers and client partners
• Additional bug fixes
The Content Player Blackboard Building Block enables instructors to upload and [...]
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The upgrade to Blackboard 7.3 changed the way Respondus retrieves the list of courses you teach. Respondus has released an update to their tool which corrects this problem. Most Respondus setups will automatically check for updates, but if you want to make sure you have the latest, here’s how
Start Respondus
Under the Help Menu, [...]
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Each semester we get a handful of questions about why Test Links in content areas aren’t included when the course is copied. I ran a series of tests to see what is and is not copied for certain combinations of Course Copy Options.
To make sure Test Links are copied, you must [...]
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The 7.3 upgrade went pretty well. One small problem we just discovered is that the ‘read’ status of all threads in all discussion boards has been reset to be unread. That is, any threads that were marked as read are now displaying as unread. If you go back and mark them read [...]
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At the BbWorld 07 conference the last July, Blackboard surprised us all by announcing they had acquired an OEM version of Safe Assignment, which they are relabeling as Safe Assign and giving at no charge to all Blackboard Enterprise customers.
We’re going to switch to the Blackboard version starting Friday August 17th. The [...]
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Problem
Collecting Messages in any discussion board redraws the screen in such a way as to prevent subsequent viewings.
Here’s how to recreate the problem
Go into any discussion board discussion
Check the boxes next to some threads, or else select all threads, click Collect to collect the messages
Observe at this point that the screen with the collected [...]
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The AOI WYSIWYG is a third-party building block that Academic Computing installed 5 years ago for Blackboard 6.0.11. AOI stopped developing and supporting the tool when they went out of business around the time of Blackboard 6.3. Even though it continued to function at this time, Academic Computing marked the tool as deprecated. [...]
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A healthy dicussion board posting
Symptoms:
A discussion board thread that has multiple replies to it may suddenly have the text of that original thread deleted and replaced with an Oracle Clob error message embedded in an HTML comment.
This will manifest itself visually in two ways
1) When viewing the discussion board, the parent thread [...]
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Instructors
Automated Instructor assignments into Blackboard begin 6 weeks before the start of Fall semester.
That would be Monday July 16th.
Instructors looking to get early access to Fall courses prior to July 16th should send a request to myusf@acomp.usf.edu
Students
Automated Student enrollmetns begin the day after finals. For Fall, this would be the day after the last [...]
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Thanks to a joint effort between Seneca College and USF Academic Computing, we’re pleased to release an interesting alternative to the standard Blackboard Course List module. My Course Plus provides a new way to organize the display of your courses, and shortcuts into your most frequently accessed course tools.
First of all, courses are grouped [...]
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Like the expiration date on all Mars candy bars, in Blackboard there is an encoded course id that precedes the title of your course. It’s not common knowledge that this course id actually has some meaning.
Academic Computing reads all course information from Oasis before putting it into Blackboard. Oasis uses [...]
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USF Academic Computing has renewed it’s license for Learning Objects - Campus Pack software. This suite of tools is integrated with your MyUSF courses. New this year: Podcasting.
Sample podcast subscription screen, complete with simple RSS subscription and quick iTunes subscription link
An instructor creates a podcast and adds episodes with the same few steps [...]
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I found a Blackboard Suggestion box today while doing some research into another problem.
[ http://www.blackboard.com/products/suggest.bb ]
Have a simple change to the Gradebook that would shave hours of your daily workload? Mad as hell about the changes to the Discussion Board? Want a Bb-enabled version of Rate My Professor? [...]
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USF Academic Computing has secured a site-license so that all USF instructors can use Respondus StudyMate product. Here are a whole bunch of good reasons to give StudyMate a try
Create Flash-based activities and games using an “offline” Windows interface
Create activities for use on iPods, Sony Playstation Portable (PSP) and other small screen devices
Four templates [...]
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This one goes out to the content creators among us. Instructors, you know who you are.
A bug in all versions of Internet Explorer prevents the Blackboard Visual TextBox Editor from successfully uploading files when embedding attachments in content items. The symptoms of breakage look like a 404 Not Found error or a [...]
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Snapshots are run regularly which normally update Blackboard with information about instructor assignments and students enrollments.
Around 8am, Sunday May 20, we had a bad run of those snapshots which returned no information from Oasis. This lack of Oasis data was then processed, which resulted in all Summer instructor and student assignments disabled [...]
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Working with Grand Rapids Community College, Seton Hall University, the University of South Florida Academic Computing and other clients, Blackboard has focused Release 7.2 on Student Achievement, providing major new functionality to:
Alert faculty and advisors early on to trends in student performance, and enable them to communicate with students to take appropriate [...]
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The bug that was addressed on Sunday has apparently introduced a new problem to those beleagured T2000 servers. This time, the machines that were patched are having permission problems writing to the shared storage. In particular it’s affecting the ability to upload files in certain situations we don’t [...]
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It took longer than we wanted, but the ability to customize the Course List module is back to working correctly again. If your unfamiliar with the feature, the Course List module provides a very nice option to edit which courses are actually displayed to you, so that if you’ve been added to courses that [...]
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Many serious problems with Blackboard were encountered after the upgrade Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. The symptoms were ugly error messages that appeared in many places, in particular when submitting a test, posting to the discussion boards, or uploading files.
The problem was identified and normal operations restored by 4pm on Sunday.
– Details [...]
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The following dates regarding enrollment and availability of the course sites may be of interest for everyone:
May 5th: A07, B07, C07, X07 Summer courses will be made available (i.e., visible) to students
May 14th: F07 Fall courses will be made available to instructors
May 28th: S07 Spring courses will be made unavailable to students
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Monday night around 10:30pm, a problem with the memory on the database server was encountered. This caused all Blackboard connections to the database to close, rendering Blackboard unavailable at this time. A restart of the database was required, and Blackboard was restored to full operation by 12 midnight.
The exact nature of [...]
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myUSF, USF’s customized implementation of the Blackboard Academic
Suite, is to be upgraded to the latest version of Blackboard, 7.2. This
software provides new features, as well as additional important
performance enhancements that have been made to the system.
MyUSF will be unavailable beginning Friday, May 11th, 2pm until
Sunday, May 13th, 8am.
- New Features -
Early Warning [...]
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Brighthouse is experiencing a problem with their network which is
causing packet loss when trying to reach USF hosts for any packet sizes
over 616 bytes. We’ve worked with a couple of folks to verify that
while they can reach on-campus hosts with 616 byte packets, anything
over that will fail.
This is not affecting all of Brighthouse’s users. [...]
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Last night while all but 30 of you were sleeping, I snuck in during the scheduled Blackboard maintenance period and installed new a database server.
The old server was a Sun V880, which had 8 1.0Ghz UltraSparc3 processors and 32Gb Memory. This worthy workhorse of a database served us well for 3 years, [...]
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USF is deeply concerned that its community may not be completely aware of the consequences of sharing music and video files without appropriate permissions from copyright owners. This brief video provides an introduction to the issue; —additional copyright information is available at https://security.usf.edu/copyright/.
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After a great deal of research, we believe we’ve finally hit upon a solution to improve the responsiveness of Blackboard. We made the change yesterday, and immediately saw great gains in some of the most problematic areas such as the login page and the discussion boards.
Please let us know if you’ve seen [...]
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myUSF, USF’s customized implementation of the Blackboard Academic Suite, is to be upgraded to the newer version of Blackboard 7.1 software to provide new features in this release, as well as, additional important enhancements that have been made to the system.
To implement this upgrade, myUSF will not be available for users from 12:01 a.m. on [...]
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The AOI WYSIWYG Editor unavailable in Blackboard. This means that existing AOI documents continue to be viewable by students and instructors and editable by instructors, but new AOI documetns cannot be created via the pulldown menu (below).
Instructors will no longer see the AOI WYSIWYG Editor as one of the content types they [...]
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Today myUSF experienced a system outage caused by a hardware failure. The servers went down around 1 pm and some users may have experienced some loss of functionality beginning around 12:30 pm. The system was fully restored with no data loss at 3:30 pm for a maximum downtime of 3 hours. Thank you [...]
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As of Thursday, August 24th the American Heritage Dictionary and Roget II Thesaurus modules were brought back online and were made available to all myUSF/Blackboard users. Look for these cool tools under your myUSF tab.
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[Click image for larger view]
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In order to prepare for the new academic year, we have expanded the myUSF
hardware back-end to improve performance and offer better response times.
As we are very conscious of how crucial this time is for all of you to
prepare for classes, we have worked diligently to restore access to myUSF
ahead of schedule. All myUSF/Blackboard services [...]
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In order to prepare for the new academic year, we will be expanding the myUSF hardware back-end to improve performance and offer better response times. Given the constant demands for online resources, our only window of opportunity to carry out this task is the intersession between summer and fall semesters.
Accordingly, myUSF is scheduled to [...]
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If you want to create and run an online survey or establish a Web site feedback form or guest book, Survey.acomp is a good tool to use. This fully Web-based tool, allows you to design the look and feel of a survey, and collects, shows, and exports the responses.
This service is available to all [...]