SCC Blackboard Blog

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2010-04-05T09:35:00.001-07:00

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Incomplete Grades

2009-03-25T13:08:00.000-07:00

Blackboard courses will be unavailable after June 30, 2009. It is important that you download any gradebooks for classes where students are working to complete assignments. Instructors are responsible to communicate to students how they are to submit final assignments to you.

Courses with Incompletes - Summer 08, Fall 08 & Spring 09

2008-09-04T16:11:00.000-07:00

Remember that our use of Bb will end on June 30, 2009. This means that if you have classes with incompletes then you must download your gradebook as a record of course activity. You might also want to download the student submissions and copy/print discussion postings. After 6/30/09 there will be no opportunity to recover your course materials.

Bb Slow to Respond - holiday weekend

2008-09-02T11:31:00.000-07:00

Several faculty reported Bb was slow to show Gradebook screens or to open the textboxes for new Announcements. These problems have been reported to the Help Desk.

Early D2L Support Materials

2008-08-27T11:52:00.000-07:00

If you are curious about d2l, checkout the early training materials posted at http://wserver.scc.losrios.edu/de/d2l/.This site includes an RSS feed so you can keep up with new postings in iTunes or with a News Reader.

Bb Sunset Timeframe

2008-08-27T11:38:00.000-07:00

Blackboard will continue to be used for classes during Fall 2008 and Spring 2009. Beginning Summer 2009 Desire2Learn will be the learning management system on campus.The schedule for training SCC faculty is being finalized and will be shared first with the "What's New with Desire2Learn" Flex participants and then via campus email to all faculty. This blog will also have the posted schedule for

Add students to your class - use this request form

2008-08-27T11:26:00.000-07:00

Bb courses from May 2008 were added to our database. Faculty use their Bb login to access a list of Bb courses and then type in the 5-digit roster/section numbers so we can link students to the right Bb course. After you make the edits in this database, David Martin, Educational Media Design Specialist, will make the connections manually the following day. SCC Bb Request Process - Faculty Login

Quiz View Error for faculty

2008-08-27T11:23:00.001-07:00

Day two of classes I heard from several faculty about an error message as they try to view or preview a quiz. Luckily Tami Cheshire was in my office and said "Oh, yes. But students can see the quiz and their responses are recorded." That tip allowed me to test a quiz from the student point of view and I confirmed that students were successful in seeing a quiz, completing the quiz and seeing the

Bb - Faculty Can Clean Up Tests & Pools - pre summer

2008-06-01T09:56:00.000-07:00

Important dates for Bb MaintenancePre-Summer 2008 semester:Bb Fall 2008 Enroll Roster to Existing Bb Course Request HTML Form All SCC Bb course status is changed to Unavailable (students will not see a course link)Bb Online for faculty May 30 to June 6, 2008 to delete OLD tests and OLD poolsBb Online for faculty June 7, 2008 (deleting tests is no longer allowed)Student enrollment process from

LMS Evaluation Taskforce Report - Senate 2/19/08 noon

2008-02-14T12:10:00.000-08:00

Colleagues, If you have an interest in the outcome of the Learning Management System Task Force recommendations (e.g., the future of Blackboard), I encourage you to attend this SCC Academic Senate meeting on Tuesday, February 19th, noon to 1 pm in RN 258. The LMS Report is a 15 minute agenda item at the end of the meeting.The LMS Task Force has recommended, and the district-wide Educational

Viewing Quizzes is Squirrelly for Instructors

2008-01-23T16:31:00.001-08:00

Ahh, the new semester and a refreshed Blackboard. This first week I've had three reports of instructors not able to see quizzes in their classes. "Maybe I'm just imagining that last semester I could see the quiz questions ..." and it seems to me that I've been able to see questions as well. Not now! Gloria Lopez was the second instructor to report this change. But it is more convoluted that that.

Acrobat request form

2008-01-10T09:52:00.000-08:00

We are continuing to receive lots of calls and e-mails about issues with the Bb request form (Acrobat). We are aware that it is not working for all users. If you encounter a problem with the form and are unable to submit your request, please contact us as follows: SCC Blackboard Faculty Support blackboard@scc.losrios.edu (916) 650-2726 Alternate phone: (916) 558-2635 We apologize for the

A word about deleting tests and pools

2008-01-08T15:31:00.000-08:00

Remember that if a test has been deployed, the deployment link must be removed before the test can be removed from the Test Manager. (You always have had the ability to remove a deployment link, so the presence of extraneous tests does not have to distract students.) Also, if a pool is being used as a source for random blocks of questions in a test, that test must be removed before the pool can

System is up / Delete unwanted test pools - Now through 1/14

2008-01-07T09:18:00.000-08:00

Blackboard is back up and available for all faculty. As a reminder, the ability to remove (delete) unwanted test pools in Blackboard as been re-activated on a temporary basis. If you have unwanted test pools in Blackboard, you are encouraged to delete them before January 14, when this function will once again be removed. As you may be aware, removal of test pools causes system instability in

Spring 2008 Bb Request Form - UPDATE

2008-01-04T19:58:00.000-08:00

What a way to end the year ... someone changed the URLs on the last working day of the year and then went on vacation. Well it messed up our Bb Acrobat Form big time. I have revised and tested the form. It is working again. Thank you for your patience! Download the Request Form to your hard drive and use Acrobat Reader to fill out the details. For the gun shy, try testing with a quick form at

Blackboard down for maintenance, 1/4 - 1/8/08

2008-01-03T16:22:00.000-08:00

Reminder, Blackboard will be down for maintenance 1/4 – 1/8/08. (Not even Bb Administrators can access the system during these dates to process course requests.) Here is the schedule: Bb OFFLINE to all users January 4-8, 2008 (archive of classes, purge assessment data, delete all enrolled students) • Bb Online for faculty January 8-14, 2008 to delete tests & other course updates •

Course Request Form - problems submitting

2008-01-03T16:19:00.000-08:00

SCC Faculty, We are experiencing issues with the SCC Bb Course Request form. It is currently unable to submit data when the form is completed. This is due to a change made by IT staff over the winter break, where the former “www” server was replaced with a new server, and hence the form cannot reference the appropriate script that allows it to submit data. (You may notice other SCC websites

Bb Server Errors - Sun AM 12/9

2007-12-10T13:10:00.000-08:00

Blackboard was offline during the 9 am to 10 am timeframe. If you had any assignments due during that time period, some students might be reporting problems to you.

@ONE Technology Skills Institute at Evergreen Valley College

2007-12-03T13:11:00.000-08:00

Hands-On Winter Institute Start off 2008 right with information you can put to use during the spring term! Join us in San Jose for 3 days of hands-on, project-based learning that will help YOU achieve your goal of doing more for your students, while saving yourself time throughout the year! The Winter Institute is an ideal place to learn new skills and apply them to your own projects, while

Bb Maintenance 11/12/07

2007-11-08T09:45:00.000-08:00

To: all Blackboard FacultyFrom: - Distictwide Bb Support TeamIn the past few weeks there have been repeated incidents of performance problems on Blackboard, including:short periods when the system has been unavailable altogether, short periods when particular pages would not load correctly (grade book, assessments, discussion boards) or not load at all, general unresponsiveness (with a variety

It's all in the patches

2007-11-05T13:46:00.000-08:00

Look for an announcement (forthcoming by e-mail) from the district regarding installation of new “patches” (code fixes) that will be installed this week. Blackboard has provided these fixes to resolve some of our ongoing performance issues, which have increased in the past two weeks.

Mark Your Calendar - Jan 08 Downtime

2007-11-05T10:54:00.000-08:00

Important dates for Bb MaintenanceClose Fall 2007 semester and begin Spring 2008 semester:Bb Spring 2008 Course Request Form (PDF)Finals - December 14-20, 2007End of Semester - December 20, 2007Save a back up of your Bb Gradebook as Excel file(one last time, afterall, this is a weekly activity, right?)Grades are due January 2, 2008Bb OFFLINE to all users January 4-8, 2008(archive of classes,

General system slowness / database error

2007-10-24T10:05:00.000-07:00

Today we are still seeing generalized slowness on the Blackboard system. Right now there are 1622 concurrent users on the system (down from yesterday’s high of 4200) and the system is still touchy. Several reports of “Database Error” messages in particular. We’ve been told that the main source of the problem is again the gradebook/assessments module. District IT is putting two more web

Five o'clock update

2007-10-23T17:03:00.000-07:00

I hate to sound like the boy who cried wolf, but we are again seeing some irregularities in the system performance. Right now we have nearly 3600 concurrent users on the system. Apparently today we hit an ALL TIME HIGH for the number of concurrent Blackboard users at 4200. Remember, the more people we cram onto the boat, the more likely we are to take on water... We are also experiencing both

Performance problems today

2007-10-23T15:02:00.000-07:00

The problem with Blackboard today appears to have been related to a background process that was running in the system. IT staff terminated that process and restarted Blackboard. As of now, Blackboard has returned to its normal functionality. We are sorry for the inconvenience. To: ARC Faculty , CRC-Faculty , FLC - Faculty