The Blackboard Helpdesk is now available 7 days a week between the hours of 9:00 am and 9:00 pm. You can reach us during those hours at our phone number 305-284-3949, or email us at any time at [email protected].
The Learning Platforms Team is pleased to announce new extended support hours effective immediately. These extended hours will be staffed by full-time employees primarily to address Blackboard issues and other technologies questions.
The Blackboard Helpdesk is now available 7 days a week between the hours of 9:00 am and 9:00 pm. You can reach us during those hours at our phone number 305-284-3949, or email us at any time at [email protected]. The Learning Platform team uses the Blackboard mailing list to communicate important information to Faculty and students. Here is a set of instructions to register and start receiving information. 1. Navigate to UM’s Blackboard Web site and Login using your Single Sign On Credentials. 2. After you Login, click on the “Help” tab. 3. From the “Help” tab, scroll down on the page. The “Email Lists” module will be on the right hand side. 4. Click “Join Now”. 5. You will be re-directed to the BB Mailing List registration page. Enter your name, email address, and click "Subscribe [BB]".
Three changes are being applied to the Blackboard system. They are not expected to cause any issues. If any problems are experienced, contact the Blackboard Help Desk at 305-284-3949 or [email protected]. CONFUSING Student PreView ICONThe version of Blackboard (April 2014) that we are running has a button that you can press to change from instructor view to student preview. In order to clarify what the button is for, we have added the words "Student Preview" to it. Clicking on the button creates a student account in your course site and puts you into that account. When you return to Instructor View you have the option of leaving the student account in your site or removing it. If you leave it in your site, the center of the "new and improved" student view button will be green. If you remove it, the center will be grey. Unreadable buttons on action bar on some pagesAfter the upgrade in December 2014, some of the buttons became unreadable. These are only on a few pages, such as the Groups page. We have changed the color of the top bar on that page from dark gray to light gray so that the buttons are now readable. This change might have side-effects and cause something else to change. If you run into such an issue, please let us know. DISAPPEARING news articlesThe "News" tab lists articles from the New York Times and UM sources. A problem made the list of articles disappear after the News tab was opened. We have corrected that so that the articles should now remain visible when you go to the News tab. The Print button has been removed from Blackboard. It was not updated, so it did not work with the version of Blackboard that we installed over the holiday break. An alternative might be to install the PrintWhatYouLike bookmarklet into your browser. It uses JavaScript to let you select what you want to print. Then you can send the selection to a printer, save it as a pdf, and more. You can get PrintWhatYouLike from printwhatyoulike.com. You install it by clicking the "Try the bookmarklet" link and following the instructions. The process to use it is as follows:
When a student drops a course/section through CaneLink, they are blocked from the course in Blackboard. They cannot see the course site in the "My Available Course Sites" list. The faculty cannot see the student in the gradebook or roster or email lists. If the student later (re)enrolls in the same course/section, the student is not unblackboard from the course/section. Blackboard board cannot unblock the student enrollment automatically. It has to be done manually, by the Blackboard Help Desk. STUDENTS If a student realizes that they cannot see a course, even though the instructor has made it available for students, the student should contact the Blackboard Help Desk at [email protected] and provide the course and the student's UM ID (C number). The help desk will unblock the enrollment. INSTRUCTORS To see the students that are blocked from a course site, an instructor can go into:
Any names in red are for students with blocked enrollments. Some of these should remain blocked, because they actually dropped the course and are not in it. Others may have dropped it and then added it again in CaneLink, but Blackboard was unable to process the change. An instructor can show just the students whose enrollments have been blocked by clicking on the "Opens" button above and to the right of the list, and then checking the "Only users who can't currently access this course" button. Submit and the list of all the students who have blocked enrollments will be provided When an instructor runs into this, either the instructor or student can contact us and we will unblock the enrollments manually. The list of course sites available on Blackboard may be different from the courses in which a student has registered. The most common reason for this is that the list on Blackboard only shows the course sites that faculty have made available for student access. There are a few common reasons that a course is not available.
10:00 pm, 12/25/14: The Blackboard upgrade has started
7:00 am, 12/26/14: Upgrade is proceeding on schedule. Something is wrong with the splash page that comes up during the upgrade. It says it is trying to redirect to a new site. But that is just cosmetic for now. 4:00 pm, 12/26/14: Update process is completed. Finalizing UM settings on Blackboard. Hope to have the system back by 8:00 pm. 7:55 pm, 12/26/14: Blackboard upgrade completed. Released to the community to log in. The Blackboard system at the University of Miami will be off-line on December 26th so that it can be upgraded. This maintenance should be completed in the late afternoon or evening. Updates and status reports will be available on the http://blackboardinfo.weebly.com web site.
This update is primarily for maintenance. Only a few things are changing and those changes are slight. We will be documenting the changes and distributing them in the next few days. The upgrade will preserve all data and accounts. Some instructional designers are going to a lot of work to modiify the Blackboard user interface. They change the color of any title in a content area to white, so that the title is hidden. Then they add their own HTML code to create a banner before the actual content. Here is an example. This works fine. The Bb title is still there, but it doesn't show up because it is white text on a white background. If you have items where the title is a link to a discussion forum or assignment, the link is now hidden, since the title is the link and the title is hidden. A new link needs to be created so the students can click on it. The designers that have done this seem to want the text in the banner be the link. The recommended way to make the banner text a link to the correct location is to use the following code, replacing "CLICK HERE" with the text you want to be the link. <a href="https://www.courses.miami.edu/webapps/blackboard/content/launchLink.jsp?course_id=@[email protected]_string@X@&content_id=@[email protected]_string@X@&mode=cpview">CLICK HERE</a> By using this <a> tag, with the @X@ template variables, you can copy your course and the links will still work in the new course site. If you simply copy the link that was in the header, the links in the copied course will point to the discussion board or assignment in the original course, not the newly copied course. This can be hard to notice, since the instructor is a member of both course sites. But a student in the new site will get an error when they try to access the discussion board in the old site.
NOTE: The <a> tag can be used anywhere in the item. So you do not have to have the title be the link. In the case above, instead of "Click on Banner or Title to go to DIscussion Board" could be replaced with "Click here to go to Discussion Board" for example. NOTE 2: This only allows you to make a link inside the specific content item. You cannot link to a different item from inside another item without hard coding the link. In that case, the link will break for students if/when the course site is copied. The Qwickly tool lets faculty easily change the availability of course sites, create an announcement and place it in one or more course sites at once, and send an email message to one or more course sites. Qwickly is found on the Blackboard Home page, at the top of the left column. The previous version of the Collaborate interface on Blackboard provided an "Allow Guests" link next on the button for both the course and instructor rooms. In the current version, you can allow non-Blackboard users to attend by selecting to "Allow Guests" in the "Room Attributes" section, when creating or setting up the room. The new interface to the Collaborate system on Balckboard has also added a "Learn More" link to find out how to upload Power Point files into Collaborate.
Microsoft has confirmed there is a serious bug in Internet Explorer, which leaves all versions of the browser open to attack.
Using Internet Explorer from a campus computer to go to internal UM sites does not pose the same risk as surfing the Internet. The following recommendations apply to your personal computers, at home. Your IT support people can help you deal with UM computers on campus. RECOMMENDED ACTIONS 1. At this time, use the Firefox, Chrome or Safar browsers, rather than Internet Explorer. Download links are provided here.
3. Regularly check for Microsoft updates and apply critical patches immediately. The originality report for SafeAssign submissions was changed on April 26, 2014, to make it look much cleaner and, hopefully, easier to read. All of the functionality is that was available before has been carried over to the new report. Here is what the new report looks like. FACULTY: Summer course sites have now been created in Blackboard. If you don’t see your new course sites in the “My Current Course Sites” module on the Blackboard Home page, follow the directions at http://goo.gl/J5fsL5. After following those instructions all your course sites should appear in your list, and the new ones will only be accessible by you.
Once your new course sites are ready for access by your students, you can follow the instructions at http://goo.gl/jSk6fi to make the sites available. If you need any assistance with any of this, or anything else related to Blackboard, please contact the Blackboard Help Desk at 305–284–3949 or [email protected]. With the beginning of a new semester, you might like to have your Blackboard course sites setup in a specific way. Below are services we offer for your course sites. Let us know if we can do any of these, or anything else to assist you at the start of the semester. Send email to [email protected] or call 305-284-3949 to make a request or get assistance. 1. Course Merge If you teach multiple sections of a course, or have both graduate and undergraduate students in the same course, it may be easier to combine them into one Blackboard course site, rather than have a separate site for each section. With the merged site, you can post your course material once rather than posting it in each section’s site separately. Note: This should be done before any activity takes place in the course sites. Please be aware User records, such as discussion board posts, grades, and assessment attempts will not be copied to the new site. The Blackboard system was upgraded to Service Pack 14. You may need to restart your browser if you don't get to the login page.
Here are a few valuable resources to familiarize yourself with the new Blackboard Learn features and be ready to integrate them in your instruction: · On-Demand Learning Center: free access to video tutorials and getting started guides · Feature Showcase: review all of the new features · Help.Blackboard.com: assistance using the new Blackboard Learn platform, organized by role · Educator Cohort: series of online meetings to familiarize educators with new features In addition, The UMIT Learning Platforms team has scheduled workshops and online training classes for faculty, instructors, and their assistants. Please click here for more information: http://www.iacevents.org/. If you have questions or concerns about these upcoming changes, please contact the Blackboard team at: (305) 284-3949 or [email protected]. December 25, 2:10 PM - the upgrade has officially started. We will provide status of the upgrade in this page.
December 25, 11:20 PM - We are running into some small delays but the tech team is confident they can get us back into schedule. December 26, 5:00 AM - The problems we experienced earlier last night were taken care of. We are now moving to the next phase and adding new licensing. December 26, 11:30 AM - Upgrade is complete, we are now starting testing the system. December 26, 3:00 PM - We are experiencing a delay caused by one of our building blocks. It should be fixed very shortly. December 26, 7:00 PM - The Upgrade is now completed ahead of the scheduled time. Blackboard is now up and running, however, the "student view" function is currently not compatible with the new service pack, therefore not working. It will be updated as soon as we have the new version. December 29 8:00 PM - The student view building block was updated and now working with Blackboard. We will be upgrading to the latest version of Blackboard Learn™, Service Pack 14, over the holiday break. Many existing features have been improved and some exciting new features added to make your day more efficient. Here is an overview of tools that you can expect to be using soon:
Blackboard will be unavailable from Wednesday, December 25th at 2 p.m. through Friday, December 27th at 1 p.m. The system is being upgraded from Service Pack (SP) 12 to SP14. Status reports, during the upgrade, will appear on this page. See above for new features in SP14. Questions? Email [email protected]. You can now view and download student names, UMID (C number), and ID from CaneLink, from the Grade Center on Blackboard. This information can be very helpful if you need to match the UMID (C Number) in Blackboard to the ID from CaneLink. Please follow the steps below to get that information: How to Download Student Information from the Grade Center 1. Go to the Full Grade Center Blackboard has the ability to quickly upload grades from a spreadsheet so that students can see the grades. Click "Read More" to view the step-by-step instructions and/or watch a video demonstration. To create a bookmark or favorite for Blackboard, drag this link to your bookmark/favorite bar: Blackboard
This bookmark(http://miami.edu/blackboard) takes you to the first page of the login process. From this page you can simply press Enter/Return to proceed to the page where you enter your CaneID username and password. (Users of Internet Explorer must click on the button to proceed to the CaneID login page.) When there are issues with the system, the first page of the login process will give you information about the situation. In addition, changes in the Blackboard login process may break other pages that are bookmarked. Please use the link above to create a bookmark/favorite. You can quickly create a "Welcome to the Class" video within Blackboard. The only equipment needed is a computer with a microphone and webcam. Go to the "Videos" section of this site for instructions and a video demonstration. This uses of the "Kaltura Media" mashup with Blackboard.
Some Macintosh browsers, in Mountain Lion (Mac OS X 10.8) do not allow the grade center to be scrolled so you can see additional grades. Firefox seems to work correctly. Safari and Chrome do not seem to show the scroll bars. There is a system wide setting that will display the scroll bars in Safari and Chrome. Follow these steps to make this change on a Macintosh running Mountain Lion (Mac OS X 10.8).
This has a side effect that all of your windows will now show scroll bars if there is material hidden beyond the windows edges. It changes the behavior of all windows, not just the grade center. On the Blackboard Home page (http://miami.edu/blackboard) you see the "Available" course sites. Instructors can see course sites that are "Unavailable" by clicking on the "Courses" tab. Students and instructors can show the "Unavailable" sites on the Home page with a few easy clicks. WRITTEN instructions
Video demonstration Instructors can quickly change the availability setting of a course site by following the instructions at http://goo.gl/jSk6fi
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