Blackboard Issues: Status Report

It might be helpful for you to know the status of several Blackboard issues reported by JCCC staff over the past several months. This should alert you to the fact that most of these issues are not yet fully resolved. While some of these issues are supposed to be resolved in version 8 of Campus Edition, we're still on Version 6.2.3 and we have no plans to upgrade at this time.

1. Ticket #478596 - Get Files on Mac Cannot Upload Multiple Files & Overwrite Existing Files, Problem Description: When using the Get Files button to upload multiple files AND overwrite existing files already in the Class Files area, Blackboard does not give the option to "Replace Existing" files. Instead the filename appears as "Null" and Blackboard offers only these options: "Select another location," "Rename," and "Skip." Resolution: This issue is scheduled to be resolved with the release of Vista 8 SP1. This release date is scheduled for the early July timeframe.
2. Ticket #483277 - Cannot Save Email Attachment to Local Workstation. Resolution, per Blackboard Staff: This issue is resolved Vista 8. I have completed my testing within our Vista 8 test environment and was unable to reproduce the issue.
   
   Note regarding version 8: The CE/Vista 8.0 product does not contain “new” functionality; instead it can be viewed more as Service Pack 4 for Application Pack 2, so essentially Vista 4.2.4/CE6.2.4. The main purpose of the CE/Vista 8.0 release is to align the numbering conventions of the Blackboard and CE/Vista product lines. The only change is that the Learning Environment Connector (providing CE/Vista clients with access to the Blackboard Community, Content and Outcomes Systems) is now built directly in to the product. However, if your institution does not chose to utilize these products then you will not notice any changes to the application only further stability and additional maintenance fixes for product defects.
3. Ticket #442776 - Moving Custom Icons Causes Edited Text Links to Revert to Original Names. Resolution: This issue has been slated for resolution in Vista 8.0 SP1. The release is scheduled for June/July timeframe. Once a final release date has been scheduled, I will either update the case notes or provide results from internal testings.
4. Ticket #443689 - Web Links Do Not Import When Importing a Learning Module. Resolution: I just completed testing this issue in our 4.2.3 and Vista 8.0 environment and it's still an issue. I will escalate this up to our developers and track the progress. Once we receive a resolution I will update the case.
5. Ticket #435137 - My Blackboard Course Listings not in Alpha Order. Resolution: This case has been escalated to our developers. Once a resolution has been released, we will update the case with any recommendations from our developers.
6. Ticket #467838 - Need Clarity in Naming Cross-Listed Courses. The default naming of cross-listed courses is confusing to instructors, designers and students. When a course is cross-listed the names of the original courses (child courses) do not appear as part of the new name (parent course shell). Instead the instructor and designer see a name like “Cross-Listed Group 599” on their My Blackboard screen. The student sees the same non-descript course name when they enter a cross-listed course. We use Respondus extensively to create an then publish assessments into Blackboard CE. The list of courses displayed by Respondus includes both the parent and the child course shell names. Since you can publish to a child course shell and NOT have it appear in the parent course, this just adds to the confusion. Resolution: None.
7. Ticket #458823 - Need Ability to Edit Assignment Drop Box Comments After They're Posted. When grading an Assignment in the Assignment Drop Box Comments text box, there's no access the HTML Creator (with a spellchecker) and once the comment is posted, there's no way to edit that comment (e.g. correct a spelling error). Resolution: Blackboard support staff submitted a feature request for this issue.
8. Ticket #458825 - Confirmation Needed Before File Attachment Deleted in Assignments Tool. An instructor accidentally deleted an attachment from an assignment in Blackboard by clicking the little icon next to the attachment. She thought it was an ActionLink icon. That icon deletes the attachment WITHOUT A CONFIRMATION BOX. We’ve duplicated the event. Worse, in this case the instructor did not have a copy of the file anywhere else. She assumed a copy was put into her Class Files area (accessible using the File Manager), but that is not the case (We confirmed that as well). Resolution: New feature request that assignment attachments be placed automatically in the Class Files area AND that a warning with an exit option appear before the attachment is permanently deleted.
9. Ticket #446216 - Teaching Assistant/Section Designers Cannot Add Public Calendar Entries. In versions prior to CE 6.1.1 staff who were enrolled in a course as both Section Designers and Teaching Assistants could add public calendar entries to the course calendar. That functionality has been reduced so individuals using that dual role can now only add private calendar entries. See attached screen capture which shows only one radio button under Entry Option. Resolution: Blackboard support wrote “I am going to submit this as an enhancement request. Let me know if you have any questions.”
10. Ticket #478596 - Get Files on Mac Cannot Upload Multiple Files & Overwrite Existing Files, Resolution: None yet.
11. Ticket #479817 - Answers not saving during quiz/test. Students are taking an online quiz/test and when clicking the "Save Answer" button the question is not saved. This appears to be a random event as sometimes the answers are saved and other times the server is slow or does not save the answer. Students taking a timed test are not able to complete the test/quiz in the allotted time due to this issue.Resolution: This issue is scheduled to be resolved with the release of Vista 8 SP1. This release date is scheduled for early July timeframe.
12. Ticket #448922 - When Saving Backup as File, Doesn't Default to Current Class Files Folder. If you don't carefully check where the file is being saved (when saving backup as a file), you may lose the backup file in a Class Files folder completely separate from the course you're in. Then, should you attempt to save a file to the course you are in, you may have a list of the bazillion courses to which you have access. Resolution: response from Blackboard support “Thank you for taking the time to submit an enhancement request to Blackboard Product Development. The suggestions we receive from you, your faculty members and students are extremely valuable, as they come from people who use our products on a daily basis. Your request has been thoroughly evaluated; at this time Blackboard does not have any plans to dedicate resources to develop this enhancement in a future release of our products. While this specific case will be closed, Blackboard is dedicated to working with you to leverage existing functionality for your needs. Our Building Block partners may be working on resolutions to your issue, and you can also work with the Blackboard Global Services team to request the development of a customization that would address your concerns. If you have any questions regarding these suggestions, please contact your Blackboard Account Manager. Again, thank you for your input. We may make statements regarding our product development initiatives, including the content of future product upgrades, updates or functionality in development. While such statements represent our current intentions, the product development initiatives may be modified, delayed or abandoned without prior notice and there is no assurance that such upgrades, updates or functionality will become available unless and until they have been made generally available through a commercial release.
13. Ticket #515267 - Assessments (Not Released to Students) Still Have Link to Results. Faculty member created practice quizzes and doesn’t want to release the grades to students. He set the assessment properties so the results would not be released to students. However, after taking the exam, students can go to the View All submissions page and while they “shouldn’t” be able to click to see submissions, it is a clickable link that goes to a screen that says “error: Sorry, this action cannot be executed.” If they try to view the submission by going to the already taken exam first then they can’t click on the title to see the submission, which is the way it should work. Resolution: Fixed in CE 6.2.2. JCCC testing indicates the problem has been corrected.
14. Ticket #458818 - Chat Invitation Window displays Incorrect Course Name. When you send an invitation in the Who’s online tool it shows the course that the person is in but the course title displays wrong. Resolution: This issue has been identified as a bug within our application. Our developers are currently investigating the source of this issue. Once I receive feedback as to a workaround or fix, I will update the case.

Online or Network Etiquette

As you work on creating or modifying an online course, share with your students your expectations regarding online etiquette (netiquette or network etiquette), specifically with regard to discussions and email communication. There are many sites that you can use to learn about netiquette and many that you can link to as an introduction to netiquette for your students. Review the following for background information:

http://web.jccc.edu/edtech/notes/store/30/Netiquette.htm
http://www.albion.com/netiquette/
http://edition.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/07/21/netiquette.tools/

Two links you might want to include in your course for student use are:

http://www.albion.com/netiquette/corerules.html
http://www.studygs.net/netiquette.htm

Other course design tips are available at http://ce-annotations.blogspot.com/search/label/Course%20Design. This basic guideline of this tip is derived from the Quality REACHE rubric (see http://cite.nwmissouri.edu/QualityReache/).

Mail Tool and the Demo Student

We logged a case with Blackboard and indicated to them that “when sending mail to all students; the demo student does not receive the message.” The response from Blackboard Support was:

“This is actually functioning as designed. To have the mail sent to the Demo student, check the box next to the Demo Student's name so that [the] mail will show up in the Demo Student's [mail] box as well. This is not quite as convenient as simply checking the box for all students, but it does send the mail to the Demo student. Let me know if you need anything else.”

Fixes in Service Pack 1

Blackboard’s Service Pack 1 (SP1), which was installed on JCCC’s production server (according to Blackboard) “resolves several Assignment (tool) related issues and lists 33 issues in total on the resolve(d) issues report.”

The following issues specifically related to the Assignments tool were resolved in SP1 and these situations should no longer occur:

• An Instructor would receive an error when trying to access an Assignment Dropbox in which Assignments had been deleted or a Dropbox for a course in which a student, who had submitted assignments, had them graded.
• There are no longer exception errors occurring when attempting to create or edit the Cutoff Date for an Assignment or when leaving blank the Cutoff Date for an assignment.
• If un-enrolling a user and then re-enrolling the same user, the data previously entered, such as grades, are retained as well as the Assignments (which prior to the upgrade were marked as Missing Attachments). Further previous Comments are now displayed.
• When the Instructor goes to the Assignment Dropbox, selects the All tab, and tries to sort the list by the "Assigned to" column, it will now sort “the list properly.” For example, clicking the “Assigned to” link in the Assignment Dropbox does now sort the Student list in alphabetical order. Note: testing at JCCC has found that the sort does now work, but it’s in alphabetical order by the first name not the last name. So it still is not useful or efficient for the instructor. We’ve reported this as a new bug.
• If an Assignment has already been created and marked gradable (numeric), if the Instructor or Designer attempts to change the Setting to Grading Form, that is now an option (we have not yet tested this at JCCC but it’s indicated as a fix in the Blackboard docs).
• Students are now able to attach files with ampersands (&) in the filename to an assignment submission. Previously, If they tried the action would not complete and an exception error was displayed.

Additional bug fixes in SP1 include:

• Accessing a student Assessment Submission for an Assessment with calculated questions no longer generates an exception error.
• Students who have been un-enrolled from a cross-listed Child Section of a Course, but not from the Parent Section, or who have been un-enrolled from both, but not from a Group within the Parent Section, were unable to view their Courses on the My Blackboard page.
• When the Course Menu is expanded or collapsed, most icons displayed a pop-up label of "course tool" rather than the tool name (e.g. “Mail”). This was problematic for students using JAWS or other assistive technology. Further, it made it hard for all users when the menu was collapsed to determine which icon represented which tool. (reported by JCCC).
• The newest version of Java (JRE 1.6.0_01) was not supported properly by the browser checker; therefore, there were multiple warnings throughout the Blackboard when attempting to login or when attempting to use Blackboard Java applets.
• When using the newest version of Java (JRE 1.6.0_01), when accessing the Chat tool a message indicated that the user could start a second Chat Session, even though the user had not yet started a Chat session.
• Following a SP2/HF1 upgrade (to CE 6.2 hotfix 1), invitations to Chat were not received. On loading the chat applet, the participant list was empty and messages were not processed.
• With Java 1.5.0_07 installed or higher, on a hyper-threaded machine, attempting to use the My Computer applet to upload a file using the Content Manager resulted in a system lock up.
• After selecting the Reviews icon to view a peer's review, the student was able to see the reviewers' username even when peer reviews for a Journal type Discussion topic were supposed to be anonymous.
• When using Grading forms, if the comments exceeded 1000 characters an exception error was displayed.
• With Internet Explorer 6 and 7, and Java 1.6.0_01, in a Discussion forum and when using the Content Manager, it was not possible to upload files using the My Computer applet.
• After updating from CE 4.1 to CE 6.0, the glossary terms no longer would hold apostrophes.
• Learning Modules containing the character # in the title or filename did not display on the Teach and Student View tabs.
• If the sender had mail forwarding turned Off in the My Tools tab options (accessed from the My Blackboard by selecting the Settings link), the email would not be forwarded to the recipient's email address regardless of whether the recipient had mail forwarding set to on/off. If the sender had mail forwarding turned On using the My Tools tab options, the email would be able to forward to the recipient's email address regardless of whether the recipient had mail forwarding set to On or Off.
• After upgrading to Application Pack 1, Service Pack 1 (CE 6.1.1), there were performance problems. It would often take 20-30 seconds to load a page. This would occur for users in courses that had a high number of Groups and Assignments.
• When using Internet Explorer 7, the Open in WebDAV Folder feature did not work.

We have tested only some of these bug fixes at JCCC.

Returned Email from Blackboard

In Blackboard, an instructor or student can have mail (received using the Mail tool) automatically forwarded to an external email client, such as Hotmail, gMail or Outlook. The net result is that when a message is received by the student or instructor (in Blackboard), a copy of the message is sent to the external email client’s inbox. This is a helpful way for the student or instructor to be alerted that a new message is waiting inside Blackboard. The copy sent to the external mail client includes the complete text of the message, so you can even read the message before logging into Blackboard.

The problem occurs, when you try to reply to the message using Outlook (or any external mail client). If you try, you’ll receive a returned mail message from Blackboard. This is functioning as designed. Blackboard allows for email to be forwarded externally but does not allow for external email to enter the Blackboard Mail system. As email is forwarded from the system it is stamped with a generic reply address from the Blackboard server. Attempts to reply to this generic address will result in a bounced email message. Blackboard’s Mail tool is completely self-contained. To send a message to any recipient in Blackboard, you must log into Blackboard and use the Mail tool.

To autoforward your email from Blackboard to an external mail client, complete these steps:

1. Log into Blackboard.
2. On the My Blackboard screen select the My Settings link (upper right corner of the screen).
3. Select the Edit Profile button (bottom left of screen).
4. In the E-mail field type the email address to which you want your Blackboard mail forwarded.
5. Next select the My Tools Option tab (top of the screen).
6. Scroll down under the Mail heading and select the checkbox in front of the Forward all mail messages to the e-mail address in my profile option.
7. Click the Save button at the bottom of the screen and you’re all set.

Forwarding Mail from Blackboard CE to Outlook or Another Mail Program

Mail forwarding in Blackboard causes all Mail tool messages sent to you CE 6 to be forwarded automatically to an external mail box (however, you still must respond to each message within a Blackboard course shell). Enabling mail forwarding is set following these steps:

1. Go to the My Blackboard page,
2. Select the My Settings link (top right of page),
3. Select the My Tool Options tab (center of three),
4. Under the Mail/Mail Forwarding area, select the “Forward all mail messages to the e-mail address in my profile” check box,
5. Click the Save button.
6. Next select the My Profile tab (left-most tab of the three).
7. Click the Edit Profile button.
8. Enter the desired external email address in the E-mail field.
9. Click on the Save button.
10. When the My Settings screen appears, click Done.

Clarification Regarding Search Tool Date Ranges

When searching for items within a course (such as student contributions or postings) you can search by a date range using the Search Tool.

When you search by a date range, you’re prompted for a Start and End date (there’s no option to specify the time of day). When you enter a date, Blackboard assumes you want an item that is date stamped 12:01 a.m. or after on the date specified. So if you enter a date range of August 15 to August 15, you’ll retrieve no listings since no items would be date stamped between 12:01 a.m. and 12:01 a.m. on the specified date.

In order to successfully search for activity on a given date (e.g. August 15, 2006), use the desired date as the Start date and the next day (e.g. August 16, 2006) as the End date.

CE 6 Now Supports Personal Settings

By default Blackboard CE 6 displays 10 entries per page when using many tools, such as the Mail tool, Discussions tool, and Assignments tool. When the default number of entries is exceeded, students often think new messages are lost or missing (because they're not displayed). In each tool, you can click the Paging Preferences icon (looks like three small dog-eared pages and it’s located in the bottom right corner of the screen) and set the default as high as 999 entries per page. When you edit this setting, it applies only to the list of entries in the current tool. If you or your students want to change the setting globally, follow these steps.

1. From the My Blackboard screen select the My Settings link (upper right corner).
2. When the My Settings page appears, select the My Tool Options tab.
3. Scroll to the bottom of the page and change the Paging option to the number of entries you want displayed by default. We suggest using 999, the maximum, to minimize the need to “page” through postings and entries.
4. When finished, click the Save button.

On that screen (before clicking Save) you have several other options including the ability to:

• Forward Blackboard mail to an external email address.
• Show all or just unread messages in the Mail and Discussions tools by default.
• Show the oldest or most recent Discussions postings at the top of the screen.
• Start the HTML Creator in each course by default.
• And more….

Using the CE 6 Tabs Properly

When new mail messages, discussion postings, or assignment are submitted in Blackboard CE, a New Activity icon (white asterisk on a green background circle) appears. However, the New Activity icon is based on items you’ve viewed or new items received on each tab (Build, Teach and Student View). When you view the new activity on one tab, the New Activity icon disappears on that tab only (e.g. the corresonding New Activity icons are still visible on the other tabs).

Blackboard CE 6 has three tabs serving three specific purposes. The Build tab is used when building the course. The Student View tab is used 1) to see how the course displays to students and 2) for in-classroom use of Blackboard (so you don’t accidentally open up the Grade Book in class). Once the course is built one should teach the course using the Teach tab. By remaining on the Teach tab throughout the semester you will always know which items you’ve opened or not. If you switch back and forth between tabs when doing routine “Teach” activities, you’ll may find “new” items identified on each tab (Build, Teach and Student View) depending on what you’ve already opened on that tab! This can be confusing if you’re unaware of the pattern.

Of course one problem of using only the Teach tab all semester is the lack of access to the File Manager among the Teach tab tools—forcing you to use the Build tab for any file maintenance or uploading. Also, the Calendar tool on the Teach tab does not allow the instructor the option of creating a new calendar entry and linking it to a Learning Module. That option is found on the Build tab only. As a result, there are times when you will need to use the Build and Student View tabs. Generally, try to remember to return to the Teach tab before tackling postings in the Discussions tool and Mail tool so you can avoid opening items already viewed.

Students Timing Out While Working on Assignments

Our JCCC Blackboard CE 6 server has a timeout setting to prevent an inactive “log-in” from consuming system resources (this also helps avoid hacking by a malicious party). The timeout is set to 70 minutes. If students are working online using the HTML Creator or entering text in a text box (e.g. in Discussions, Mail or Assignments) and do not interact with Blackboard for 70 minutes, they’ll be logged off the system automatically. Switching to another tab or saving a message or a posting in draft form re-starts the 70 minute cycle. It’s just when the student types in a text box or in the HTML Creator without using any other Blackboard features, that Blackboard will consider the account as inactive.

To avoid this problem, an alternative is for your students to compose their assignments in Microsoft Word (or another word processor) and then copy and paste the text into Blackboard. If you have your students submit their assignment as an attachment the timeout is usually not an issue.

If the student’s account “times out” before they finish the assignment, they’ll lose their work.

By the way, if a student is taking an assessment, the 70 minute cycle restarts each time an answer is saved or if the student moves from one question to another.