If Students Report Assignment or Assessment Time Changes

The following is (partially) old news, but it may impact assignments and assessments submitted recently by your students IF the start date, end date, due date or cutoff date was on Sunday, November 4, 2007 AND you modified the assessment or assignment in any way. Just FYI, from Blackboard Support:

Blackboard has identified an issue which causes the start and end dates of assessments and the due and cutoff dates of assignments to count back one hour each time a Section Designer adjusts any settings in that assessment or assignment. This issue only affects assessments and assignments that have a start, end, due date or cutoff date of Sunday, November 4, 2007. For instance, if the assessment (or assignment) is set to end at 8:03 PM and the Section Designer makes any adjustments resulting in pressing the "save" button, the new end time for the assessment will roll back to 7:03 PM. Saving the same assessment one more time will result in the end time changing again to 6:03 PM. In rare instances, the date may also flip back.

This affects all systems using CE 6.2, CE 6.2.1, CE 6.2.2, Vista 4.2, Vista 4.2.1 and Vista 4.2.2 with a Time Zone setting inside the United States, including Indiana (East). This only affects Sections with an assessment or assignment using the date of November 04, 2007, March 9, 2008, and November 2, 2008 (or any date where the time changes due to DST). Times in March will roll forward one hour with each save. Times in November will roll back one hour with each save. This issue does not affect any other dates.

Blackboard is currently investigating this issue. A fix for this issue will be included in a future release and we hope to have this available prior to March 9, 2008, the next scheduled occurrence of Daylight Savings Time. In the meantime, we suggest that Blackboard system administrators inform their users of this issue and, in the event an assessment or assignment needs to be edited, the user increment the time for the November 04, 2007 element by one hour before saving so that the desired time is reflected when it is saved. If you have further questions or concerns please contact Blackboard Client Support.

Strange Calendar Behaviors

Please be aware of the following changes in behavior in the Calendar tool subsequent to the upgrade to CE 6.2.1 (App Pak 2 with Hotfix 1 applied):

1. It’s common to copy a course from a previous course shell and then want to move the calendar entries to new dates in the new course. When you change the date for a Calendar entry (by simply modifying the date), the screen refreshes and brings you back to "today's date" (such as the 14th if today's the 14th of August) but in the month from which you came (e.g. the original month in which the date occurred before you edited it), but not on the specific date of the original entry you edited. So, if you’ve got three items on January 18th and you want to move them to August 16th (and today is August 14th), each time you change the date of an item on January 18th Blackboard “leaves“ you back on January 14, rather than on the 18th. If you’re moving an item from February 20 to September 25th, after the change you’ll end up on February 14th.
2. Some faculty have reported not being able to edit calendar entries after a course copy. No underlying cause has been found yet.
3. New Calendar entries default to today’s date no matter what you do. If you move to a date in November and try to add a Calendar entry on November 2nd, the default date will be today’s date, not the date you selected in November. You can change it each time, but there’s no sense in navigating to the new month and date, since you’ll need to set the date each time you add an entry.
4. If you try to set a time for an event (entry in calendar or assignment or assessment due date) after 10:59 PM on November 4, Blackboard changes the time to an hour earlier. This is the date that Daylight Savings time ends in the Fall of 2007. If you type in a time (like 11:00 PM) or use the drop down menu to choose a time, it may appear correct until you save it, then the time is set back without warning to 10:00 PM. This anomaly only occurs on November 4. If you don’t expect this, you can be frustrated and waste a lot of time trying to figure it out.
5. If you create calendar entries (not linked to anything like an assessment or assignment) and copy the course to a new course shell, Public entries and Personal entries will copy to the new course shell. Private entries do not copy over. They are not visible even if the “This Course + Personal” view is selected.