Notes on Blackboard Upgrade Conference Call - 11/6/2007

Red - Greater interest to Faculty
Blue - My additional comments

Attended:

Blue Ridge, Central, Danville, Germanna, J.Sargeant Reynolds, John Tyler, Lord Fairfax, Northern, Patrick Henry, Piedmont, Rappahannock, Southwest, System Office - carol

Thomas Nelson, Tidewater, Virginia Highlands, Virginia Western, Wytheville

Did not attend:

Eastern Shore. Dabney, Mountain Empire, New River, Paul D. Camp, Southside

The call began by reviewing known issues from the VCCS Discuss thread, then moved to college questions:

Question: It is taking several attempts to log in.

Answer: Noticed this too. Should now be fixed.

Question: Will the generic faculty and student accounts remain?

Answer: Yes.

TNstudent is available for you to enroll in your classes to "practice" with. If you need the password please contace me or Jan.

Question: We liked Pirate and Pig Latin. Can we have them back?

Answer: We’ll see how much of a sense of humo(u)r AS & R has.

Question: Is it safe to add a module assigned to the GCC role to the Research tab?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Color scheme on shared tabs has been changed again

Answer: Don’t do this.

Question: Can the course level Change Password link be a redirect instead of being disabled?

Answer: If it’s technically possible, yes, that is desirable.

Question: Where are the Modify Content and Modify Layout options on tabs?

Answer: Tab personalization was defaulted to Off, but colleges are welcome to turn it on on their college tab.

Question: We have some courses from Summer 2007 that will need archiving/restoring.

Answer: Please send us a list.

Question: When can we put in spring 08 courses?

Answer: Now.

Use the request form: http://community.tncc.edu/cgi-bin/rws3.pl?FORM=bb_new_request

Question: What about the current pilots – classtop, studymate, respondus – these are mentioned in the Faculty Instructional Software module.

Answer: Good point. We will review and adjust the module as appropriate. The latter two should continue to work with Blackboard 7, but Classtop is still in pilot on Explore. We don’t have the Respondus Lockdown Browser, but that is not mentioned on Bb7.

Question: How do we link to Spring 2008 courses for guest access?

Answer: Please get with us. However, assuming you know the internal ID for each course, the format of a course link is:

http://bb7.vccs.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_id=_2_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fexecute%2Flauncher%3Ftype%3DCourse%26id%3D_%3cINTERNAL_ID_NUMBER_GOES_HERE%3e_1%26url%3D

Our custom linker on My VCCS:

https://my.vccs.edu/bbcourse?id=%3cPUBLIC_ID_GOES_HERE%3e&action=launch

Will not link to Blackboard 7 until Go Live.

Question: Please get Quick Enroll ASAP

Answer: It’s a high priority.