Preparing for the New Semester Blackboard Caveats

The following caveats may save you some grief as you make final preparations for Spring 2008. Please read on.

1. If you attempt to copy content into a course shell for the new semester and it fails, don’t bother trying again. Our experience is that once a course shell copy fails, and subsequent attempts will also fail.
2. JCCC uses Banner integration and we have had problems with incomplete course rosters (failure of the enrollment synchronization process) for cross-listed courses in the past. To assure that you’re not bitten by this “bug” do the following. If you’re teaching a cross-listed course, log-in to MyJCCC (JCCC's Luminus portal), select the My Courses tab and print the roster for each of the cross-listed course sections. Then log-in to Blackboard, locate the cross-listed course on the My Blackboard screen (it should have a non-descript name such as “Cross-Listed Group 999 – Cross-Listed Group.” Enter the course (the link points to the parent course shell that should include all students in all sections of the cross-listed “child” sections of the course). Check that all students on the rosters from MyJCCC are included in the course Grade Book.
3. Remember, courses cannot be cross-listed after any student activity exists or that activity will be inaccessible.
4. If you’re using the SafeAssign tool in Blackboard, do not delete the Grade Book column associated with a SafeAssign assignment. If you do, the SafeAssign data for the associated SafeAssign assignment will no longer be accessible to users. Blackboard is working on a fix targeted for late January 2008, but for now, please do not delete columns in the Grade Book associated with SafeAssign.