Bb Conference Call - 12/4/2007

Red - Greater interest to Faculty
Blue - My additional comments

Attended:

Blue Ridge, Central, Dabney, Danville, Germanna, J.Sargeant Reynolds, John Tyler, Lord Fairfax, Northern, Piedmont, Rappahannock, Southside, System Office, Thomas Nelson, Virginia Highlands, Virginia Western, Wytheville

Did not attend:

Eastern Shore. Mountain Empire, New River, Patrick Henry, Paul D. Camp, Southwest, Tidewater

General notes and observations:

Colleges will need to identify the primary administrator for their college. This user will have access to system-wide data. Other administrators will only have access to data within their (college) domain.

There are already two support roles created that can be assigned to users within a (college) domain. Permissions associated with each are attached.

Course Migrations

From December 20, we will begin the migration of Fall 2007, .DEVL, .WRKS, .TMPL courses and organizations. Prior to this, college administrators are strongly encouraged to look at the archive logs on the archive server (http://chat.vccs.edu/vccs-archives/) to see if there are any errors that need addressing.

If there are courses or sets of courses that can be migrated prior to December 20, please let us know. Students are already in the system, so it is not a problem from that perspective.

Questions

Question: What is the status of Wimba Podcasting and Classtop? What about Blackboard Scholar?

Answer: Wimba Podcasting is working. Classtop is a priority for first quarter of Spring 2008. In general building block evaluations are coordinated through Inez Farrell in AS & R. Joan Osborne is working on evaluating Scholar for the DDLC.

Question: Changing a course name doesn’t work through the System Admin panel

Answer: It can be done through the course control panel

Question: When bringing a course into bb7, not everything was visible

Answer: College Admins need to self-enroll as instructors (this is a high priority to fix – see earlier call notes)

Question: How can colleges do evaluations anonymously if dummy accounts aren’t feasible?

Answer: Surveys in Blackboard are anonymous

Question: Some assignments are broken.

Answer: When copying assignments, you must also copy gradebook settings.

Question: In adaptive release, the group invert button doesn’t seem to work

Answer: Will need to check. I think it does. Invert simply reverses the selections in the current box, it doesn’t move anything from one side to the other.

Jan will be doing training on Adaptive Release in January. Watch for her workshop schedules.

Question: What is the status of dummy accounts?

Answer: Will try to get some more clarification, but the rule of thumb is that accounts should not be shared, especially if they are privileged in any way. Any VCCS user should use only their account and no other.

Question: How can a college make a Blackboard course available to non-vccs students?

Answer: Use generic xxstudent account or make the course available to guests.

Login: TNStudent; Call Jan or me for the Password.

Question: Observed that courses imported had tools defaulting to off

Answer: Not sure why this is happening. Doesn’t appear to be systematic.

Question: It appears that discussion board posting is slow if there are thread subscriptions and users are subscribed to receive the body of posts rather than links.

Answer: Will investigate and report to Blackboard.

Question: Are email notifications working?

Answer: Some, at least, seem to be. We need more data. Please identify emails that you expected to receive but did not, and if possible provide the server you were on (http://bb7.vccs.edu/whereami.html).