Distance and Distributed Learning

YouTube Auto-Captioning

2010-03-30T10:51:00.002-04:00

YouTube now has auto-captioning. If you're using the EDU portion of YouTube http://www.youbube.com/edu , auto-captioning makes your work ADA and accessibility compliant.

Background Info

DDLC Meeting Minutes- 9/18/08

2008-11-13T09:18:00.001-05:00

Distance and Distributed Learning Committee

Meeting Minutes

September 18, 2008 10am – 3:00pm

I. Call to order

Kim Blosser called to order the regular meeting of the DDLC at 10:00am on September 18, 2008 at PVCC in Charlottesville.

II. Roll call

Kim Blosser conducted a roll call with some attending at PVCC and others connected through Adobe Connect meeting. The following members attended in person: Kim Blosser, David Carter-Tod, Jaime Shetrone, Derek Cooper, Jennifer Lerner, Adam Bryant (for Linda Claussen), Jan Klingberg, Marian Macbeth, Ashley Leslie, Colleen Bishop, Joan Osborne, Bill Hightower, Mike Williams, Ramona Coveny, Diane Tucker.

Special Guests attending in person: Donna Jovanovich, Marcia Harrington, and CJ Bracken.

Members attending via Adobe Connect: Susan Beasley, Ken Fairbanks, Leslie Smith, Bill Dey, Charles Boling, Susan Kennedy, Sheila Hobbs, Mark Nelson, Paul Weitzel.

Action Item 1-6

Election of 2008-09 DDLC Chairperson:

Kim Blosser was elected chairperson.

Election of 2008-09 DDLC NoteTaker:

Ramona Coveny was elected notetaker.

Election of 2008-09 DDLC Site Administrator:

Joan Osborne was elected site administrator.

Approval of Minutes:

Kim Blosser reviewed the minutes from the last meeting. The minutes were approved with one minor change.

Review/Approval of dates for DDLC meetings for 2008-09:

November 13, 2008 (eMeeting and phone conference) 9:00-11:30am

February 5, 2009 (eMeeting and phone conference)

* a request was made to have an in-person meeting (with phone conference). We will address this after the extent of the budget cut is known.

April 2, 2009 (New Horizons conference)

Chair’s suggested changes to term of membership/election process:

Kim will send items for considerations before the next meeting as to changes in the term of electoral officers and the election process.

III. Open Items

a) Action Item 7: Full committee review and approval of Best Practices for eLearning document
The Best Practices for eLearning document will be a dynamic document. It was noted that the section Online Delivery Standards (pg 8) could include content about secure login and best practices for design and integrity for students and faculty. The discussion about section Placement Testing and Advising clarified Compass testing being available at each VCCS institution. Students who take the Compass testing at a college will abide by the requirements of that institution even though they are enrolled at another VCCS institution (i.e. cost for Compass testing).
The motion was made to submit the Best Practices for eLearning document to the next ASAC meeting. The motion was approved by the committee.

b) Discussion Item 1: Focus on Student Success (Bill Hightower, Donna Jovanovich, Marcia Harrington)
Bill Hightower presented information from the system office. The VCCS Policy Manual sections 5 and 6 are being reviewed for student success. Some of the items mentioned in these sections were distance learning course peer review and academic advising online with a possible target for developmental and distance learning. Donna Jovanovich and Marcia Harrington presented on student success and told the committee that would receive corrected assessment data previously provided. The Chancellor’s Retreat document is available online.

c) Discussion Item 2: Blackboard
David Carter-Tod reported that the upgrade to Blackboard is on track with a proposed date for the upgrade of December 20 (which has since been changed to January 2, 2009 after the ASAC meeting). The BB8 test server Explore will be upgraded with the latest patches as soon as possible. MAESTRO (a video/audio software used at NOVA for foreign language) has a building block available for Blackboard. The order for installing BB building blocks will be reviewed at the next meeting. A sub-group may be formed to evaluate SIS and Blackboard integration so that students will be removed from Blackboard as they are in SIS when the student changes or drops a class. The SSL restriction cannot be removed until more colleges test and validate.

d) Information Item 1: Update on 2008-09 CEED Grant process
A new third track has been added to the CEED Grant process. The third track will target developmental, adult education, CTE, student advisement, and workforce development. The awards can be multi-year awards from $100,000 to $50,000. An institution can be a lead in two projects and additionally be non-lead participants in two projects. The RFPs are due in October and the awards are announced in November 2008.

e) Information Item 2: Deployment of Southern Regional Education Board (SREB) for every VCCS distance learning courses.
SREB has been given the information for all VCCS distance learning courses so they will be automatically updated from the SIS to the SREB website. Students who find a distance learning course on the SREB site will enroll through the offering college.

f) Information Item 3: Google Apps
Google Apps has been deployed successfully for faculty and student use. David Carter-Tod informed the committee that there is a free trial available for Google Video in a six-month pilot. Continued use of Google Video with 3GB of storage is $10 yearly.
A sub-group will be created to prepare Google Apps training materials which will posted on the VCCS Google Apps site.

g) Information Item 4: Availability of Course Content – Get Ready for A&P
A purchasing agreement with Pearson Publishing will allow VCCS faculty to have access to course content in A&P through a Blackboard course module called Get Ready for A&P. While the target audience is Allied Health, there are other content modules within the course that may be used outside of this curriculum. There are lessons, activities, practice, and assessments on Study Skills areas, developmental reading, and math that may be useful to many students. Have your Blackboard administrator contact Inez Farrell to use the content.

h) Information Item 5: TOP (Teaching Online Program), VFLA, and the life cycle of a CEED
This 3-credit graduate class (EDU 295) had impressive enrollments for the first offerings. More classes will be offered during Fall semester. The SO is working towards obtaining graduate credit for this class through VPI and/or ODU. Another successful CEED grant is VFLA (Virtual Foreign Language Group at NOVA), a collaborative effort using WIMBA.

i) Information Item 6: Security of Publisher Websites
The committee discussed possible issues with publisher websites where the course supporting materials are housed on the publishers’ website and not through Blackboard. The committee recommended that the concerns about grades and FERPA be taken to either the ASAC educational technology subcommittee or the Technology Council meeting on September 30.

j) Information Item 7: Wimba Classroom pilot project
LFCC asked if there were any colleges interested in partnering with them in the Wimba Classroom pilot project as they wish to continue it for another year.

IV. New business
There was no new business.

V. Adjournment

Kim Blosser adjourned the meeting at 3:00 pm on September 18, 2008.

Minutes submitted by: Ramona Coveny

Minutes approved by:

New Procedure for Bb requests for FA08

2008-06-05T12:23:00.003-04:00

As of this fall, Blackboard course shells will be automatically created for ALL academic courses!

ALL courses in SIS on or before June 3, 2008 now have shells in Blackboard.
All instructors that were assigned a course in SIS on or before June 3, 2008 now have access to their course shells.
These courses are set to be "unavailable" to students, BUT not the instructors.

The next upload of instructors will be on Friday July 11, 2008.

Instructors will be batch uploaded each Friday before 2:00pm.
The course request form should only be used when a new courses is added to SIS.
The request form will NOT open again until July 5, 2008.
Do NOT use the request form without checking Blackboard first.

If you are new to Blackboard you will need to attend training on Blackboard.

Training dates/times http://community.tncc.edu/faculty/klingberg/TNCC/_registration.htm or contact Jan Klingberg for more information about training.

Notes on Bb Conference Call - 5/6/2008

2008-05-08T11:36:00.001-04:00

Red - Greater interest to Faculty
Blue - My additional comments

Attended:

Blue Ridge, Central, Danville, John Tyler, Lord Fairfax, Northern, Piedmont, Rappahannock, Southside, Tidewater, Thomas Nelson, Virginia Western, Wytheville, System Office

Did not attend:

Dabney, Eastern Shore, Germanna, J. Sargeant Reynolds, Mountain Empire, New River, Patrick Henry, Paul D. Camp, Southwest, Virginia Highlands

SSL

Blackboard Production is now optionally available via SSL. Please continue to test and report any issues.

We will look into enabling WebDAV for a subset of users to test if that is technically possible, but we are not sure it is.

There was reported an interaction between SafeAssign and SSL. Kristen Kelly has the details.

Oracle RAC

We are planning to move the Blackboard database to Oracle RAC. This is currently scheduled for July 16, 17 and may involve Blackboard being unavailable for those two days. Please let your faculty know so that they can prepare.

Google Apps for Education

While not yet decided, a recommendation will be made to Tech Council to move student email to Google Apps.

Blackboard Testing Issues

Several administrators reported intermittent, substantially un-reproducible testing issues. Question saving doesn’t seem to be working for a few students.

It is recommended that you remind students not to use the Save test option.

Blackboard Gradebook Issues

A couple of colleges (CVCC and WCC) reported an issue where grades shifted down a row. This is also unreproducible and seems specific to particular faculty (courses?).

Innovative Faculty Listserv

The Innovative faculty list (https://lists.vccs.edu/lists/listinfo/VCCS-Innovative-Faculty) is up and running. BB admins are welcome to subscribe.

Please let me (Ruth) know if you are interested in joining this list.

Blackboard's Performance

2008-02-18T10:02:00.000-05:00

Dr. Inez Farrell (Director of Instructional Technology, VCCS) is collecting anecdotal notes about Blackboard's performance.

Dr. Farrell has created a short and simple form called “Taking Blackboard’s Pulse”. When faculty face a problem that is frustrating but not quite of the Issue Track variety, they can quickly fill out and submit this form by clicking the link below. In this fashion, she can see issues as they develop and either contact the college Bb admin for follow up for more information (such that an Issue Track would need) or directly alert ITS to the number and frequency of the anomalies. Faculty can also see what is happening across the state. Faculty, learning center and helpdesk personnel are encouraged to fill out this form when they meet a difficulty they do not consider Issue Track worthy.

Link for "Taking Blackboard's Pulse":
http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pA7fQuiFiWV0z2i-L5NK-Kw

A new module has been added to the TNCC tab: Where Am I?

The Where Am I? modules tells you what server you are connected to for reporting problems. In the example above the server would be utbc01b02. Clicking on the Switch hyperlink will allow you to disconnect from a "sluggish" server (it kills the load balancer cookie), meaning that you stand a good chance of being assigned to a new app server.

Jan and I are also still filing Issue Track's as you report problem to us, but in order to fill out an Issue Track (system office) we need:

the server you are on
the date and time
the activity you were doing
home/campus

Other useful information is

your browser (IE 6, IE 7, Mozilla)
your operating system (OS 10, Vista, Win XP)
your service provider
screen shots of the error message (if applicable)

Notes on Bb Conference Call - 1/29/2008

2008-02-14T11:12:00.001-05:00

Red - Greater interest to Faculty
Blue - My additional comments

Attended:

Blue Ridge, Central, J. Sargeant Reynolds, John Tyler, Lord Fairfax, Northern, System Office, Piedmont, Southwest, Thomas Nelson, Virginia Western, Wytheville

Did not attend:

Dabney, Danville, Eastern Shore, Germanna, Mountain Empire, New River, Patrick Henry, Paul D. Camp, Rappahannock, Southside, Tidewater, Virginia Highlands

As with the notes from 1/22/2008, these notes are a bit scrawny.

No-copy/no-print script issues
Please see the thread on VCCS discuss. We will put these in one spot that is accessible to faculty.

Where is the Quick Enroll bookmarklet?http://learn.vccs.edu/bbcswebdav/users/wccartd/pub/quickEnroll.html
Include some information on building blocks and order of priority
Our first priority is 7.3 sp1, but after that we will begin to focus on building blocks. In order, these are:

Classtop
SafeAssign – free replacement for Turnitin
Respondus Lockdown Browser
LearningObjects
iTunes

Some tests are not copying
Please file a ticket
SSL
We are working with Blackboard consulting to implement SSL. We will test the impact of this before any production implementation, and run SSL in parallel to regular access before any switchover.
Discussion board performance is still an issue
SP1 will hopefully resolve some of this.
Future schedule for audio-conferences
The consensus during the call was that we could shift to an every other week schedule from now on. The next call will be on 2/12/2008.

Notes on Bb Conference Call - 1/22/2008

2008-02-14T10:41:00.001-05:00

Red - Greater interest to Faculty
Blue - My additional comments

Attended:

Blue Ridge, Central, Danville, John Tyler, Lord Fairfax, Northern, System Office, Southside, Southwest, Thomas Nelson, Virginia Highlands, Virginia Western, Wytheville

Did not attend:

Dabney, Eastern Shore, Germanna, J. Sargeant Reynolds, Mountain Empire, New River, Patrick Henry, Paul D. Camp, Piedmont, Rappahannock, Tidewater,

These notes were written up a couple of weeks after the call, so some details may be fuzzy. I apologize for the tardiness.

When will Bb6 go down?
Close of business on Friday, January 25.

This was done. We do have the backup archives.
Self-assessments problem – hiding the grade from the gradebook
There is a combination of checkboxes that if the instructor is not careful, will prevent them from seeing student grades. There is no simple resolution to this at this time.
Some reports of slow-loading graphics and in faculty courses
Please see the threads on troubleshooting Blackboard in VCCS Discuss.
Some HTML is disabled by Blackboard
Yes. BB 7.x is very assertive about not allowing potentially harmful HTML through its filters.
What are the best options on no-print/no-copy?
Please see thread on VCCS Discuss.

There are three versions of the no-copy/no-print javascript. These are:

http://nl.tncc.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.princeton.edu/as/bbfaq/Endtime_Counter.htm
http://nl.tncc.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://itc.boisestate.edu/BbSupport/BbDocs/instructors/NoPrintCopy.htm

http://nl.tncc.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.wcc.vccs.edu/services/blackboard/tipsTricks.html%23copy

The Princeton code is an evolution of David Carter-Tod's original code (bb6) with a forced submit of tests.

Implementing this code is best done by placing in the instructions of the test with the WYSIWYG editor turned off. Even if you do implement this code, there are risks (see the caveats on the Princeton page), particularly with essay questions, and no-one would claim that these make tests completely secure.

They don't deter the determined.

What is the Building blocks schedule – e.g. Classtop, SafeAssign, Facebook integration?
The first priority is 7.3 Service Pack 1. We are making significant progress with this. Inez Farrell is coordinating Building Block priorities.

Scheduled to be implemented on Feb. 14, 2008 – midnight to 2am
Impatica – jar versus zip
Not sure what the issue was here. One format was working better than the other
Changes not sticking or appearing later
There have been a couple of reports of changes not appearing immediately, but at a later time. There is no technical reason why this would happen. If this can be reported via Issuetrak, we’d be happy to investigate.
Can server bounces be documented in the current performance ticket to facilitate responding to students?
We will attempt to do so.
Request module deletion
While modules can be added by admins, deletion must be requested via Issuetrak. This is to prevent inadvertent deletion of shared material.
Large discussion boards appear to be slow
Please point us at specific boards, but we also expect SP1 to provide a performance boost for discussion boards.
Module movement
Colleges can easily administer their own tabs, but should request via Issuetrak any changes to shared tabs.

Notes on Bb Conference Call - 1/8/2008

2008-01-22T11:34:00.000-05:00

Red - Greater interest to Faculty
Blue - My additional comments

Attended:

Danville, Germanna, J. Sargeant Reynolds, John Tyler, Lord Fairfax, Northern, Patrick Henry, Piedmont, System Office, Thomas Nelson, Tidewater, Virginia Highlands, Virginia Western, Wytheville

Did not attend:

Blue Ridge, Central, Dabney, Eastern Shore, Mountain Empire, New River, Paul D. Camp, Rappahannock, Southside, Southwest

Overview:

Our focus during the first few weeks of the semester is on performance. We had some fairly significant slowness on Monday, but things have generally improved through the week as we have implemented additional tuning. As of this writing, Monday 14^th, which is the first day for NVCC is passing off smoothly aside from some problems specific to MECC, with as many as 1.9 million hits/hour.

On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday we had over 22 million hits each day. This represents 10 million more hits per day than our Fall peak and is over double our peak from the same time last year. This is obviously an extremely significant increase in traffic.

We identified the ‘What’s new” module as a source of database issues and we have disabled it.

Blackboard has release a service pack for 7.3, which has performance improvements and we intend to implement as soon as possible after testing. They have also released 8.0, but we have no plans currently to go to that version.

The course migration completed in about two weeks despite some problems over the break. Generally this has been smooth, but there have been some courses with issues that needed resolving.

Blackboard 6 is still up at http://bb6.vccs.edu/. There are 4 CPUs assigned to this at the database level. However, we plan to turn Blackboard 6 off on January 25.

An issue was identified with the Chat Server. This was resolved later on Tuesday.

Question: Is the Home page tool turned off?

Answer: No, but make sure the Roster is turned on in the class.

Question: Any sign of a Quick enroll feature?

Answer: No, but check out: http://learn.vccs.edu/bbcswebdav/users/wccartd/pub/quickEnroll.html -- we could probably do some more sophisticated things with GreaseMonkey given time, but this helps. If you add &userName=yourusername to the end of the quick enroll script, it will default to your username.

Question: Are the utility tools e.g. batch availability available in bb7?

Answer: Batch availability can be done in the web UI.

Question: What about Bb6 classes with final incompletes?

Answer: Blackboard 7 is our production system now. Students should not be using Blackboard 6.

Question: Quotas? Those emails are a real pain.

Answer: Ain’t they just? There are two quotas in Blackboard – a soft quota simply generates a warning. We have increased this to just over 1 GB. The hard quota is currently 2GB. Strategies to manage significant file content include:

1. Identify ways to reduce file size, e.g post PDF rather than Powerpoint, reduce image sizes, and generally use compressed formats. This benefits students as well.

2. Use the Content System. We can increase quotas to meet needs on the content system and content can be shared across courses.

3. Store files on college servers, linking to them from Blackboard

We will discuss further with AS & R. If, despite the above measures being taken, a quota needs to be increased, that may be possible.

Question: It appears that .mht files on content system became corrupted during the migration

Answer: We can look at this. Please file a ticket.

Question: Getting outage page sometimes. Slowness, etc.

Answer: Please add to Ticket #91486 for any performance issues with Blackboard 7. The outage page may appear when an application server is bounced, but we are still investigating.

Question: Can we have the eportfolio functionality on Blackboard?

Answer: There’s a major bug with the permissions on ePortfolios, but that aside we do not have a great deal of faith in Blackboard’s implementation of ePortfolios and feel that alternatives may well be more viable.

Question: What about faculty being able to combine enrollments from multiple classes into one.

Answer: Will investigate. Might not be technically possible.

I am currently able to do these combinations for faculty. If you need assistance please call me (2807).

Question: is there a way to alter batch individual availability within courses?

Answer: Not at the moment

Additional Notes:

We plan on implementing Domain-related administrative changes after Tuesday, 1/15. Make sure all courses are appropriately categorized.

We plan on turning off of Blackboard 6 on January 25.

We have been alerted to a security issue with WebDAV for the content system and will be turning off this functionality until we can implement SSL. A longer separate communication will be forthcoming.

Notes on Bb Conference Call - 1/15/2008

2008-01-22T10:44:00.000-05:00

Red - Greater interest to Faculty
Blue - My additional comments

Attended:

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

Did not attend:

Dabney, Eastern Shore, Mountain Empire, New River, Patrick Henry, Paul D. Camp, Rappahannock, Wytheville

Overview and preliminary remarks

As per previous communications, performance has gradually improved after a bit of a shaky start, and Monday 14^th generally went very well. It was our busiest day of the year so far with over 27 million hits, with a peak per hour of 1.9 million hits. A lot of these are images attached to page loads, so some statistics related to distinct sessions and user logins is attached.

We plan on implementing Domain-related administrative changes after Tuesday, 1/15. Make sure all courses and organizations are appropriately categorized as soon as possible. Review the recording of this session for screen captures of how to do this.

We plan on turning off of Blackboard 6 on January 25.

We have been alerted to a security issue with WebDAV for the content system and will be turning off this functionality until we can implement SSL. A separate communication will be forthcoming, but this will be done on Friday, 18^th January.

Question: The problem with Wimba announcements—is there any way to prevent it?

Answer: We will follow up with Wimba but at the moment they are acknowledging it as a known bug. It is related to the WYSIWYG editor (and Internet Explorer I think). Turning off the WYSIWYG editor will prevent it happening.

See http://d2.parature.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=263&fieldOffset=14&hitOffset=348+312+304+119+50+18+

Question:Having a problem with respondus – “cannot be verified or opened”

Answer: Check that the setting is for Blackboard 7.x May need to reinstall. Otherwise, please file a ticket.

Question:Having problems with Vista and the discussion board.

Answer: General rule of thumb is to turn off the WYSIWYG editor and see if that addresses the problem. Also check Java and any related security settings.

Question: Transferring files from Wimba in Blackboard 6 is tedious.

Answer: You can grab all the files in a Voice Board in one Export operation.

Question: When taking a test, the computer slows to a crawl with one character at a time coming in to the answer field.

Answer: Probably computer or browser specific. Please file a ticket, but review OS, etc.

Question: Dates of availability in announcements and chat don’t seem to work.

Answer: See ticket #91347

Question: How do you categorize courses and organizations?

Answer: In the System Admin control panel, find the courses you are seeking to categorize, e.g. with a search like “VH2 SP08”. Then go to the bottom of the page and choose Show All. Then go to the bottom of the page and choose Select All to check all the checkboxes. Then choose the Availability button at the top of the page.

Comment: Quick enroll is a bit of a pain.

Answer: See last week’s notes for an improvement to the bookmarklet, plus also get the Enrollment bookmarklet to facilitate unenrolling: http://learn.vccs.edu/bbcswebdav/users/wccartd/pub/quickEnroll.html.

Question: Had a couple of reports of items being posted, but that subsequently disappeared.

Answer: Please get us details if possible, but theorize that it could be related to performance and server bounces, which have significantly reduced since last week.

This may be related to how often your browser is set to check for a new page. Adjust how often to update stored pages in cache (Temporary Internet files)

Question: Students are confused by the discussion board calendar thing.
Answer: What discussion board calendar thing?

Question: Are there archives of Spring 2008 courses yet?

Answer: No, not yet. Will start on the evening of Thursday, 1/17.

Comment: Inez Farrell has files of incompletes from Fall 2007 that she is happy to share with Blackboard administrators. Please contact her for your file. Note that those with access to SIS Query should be able to use the VX_INCOMPLETE_GRADES report.

Notes on Bb Upgrade Conference Call -12/18/2007

2007-12-24T03:41:00.000-05:00

Red - Greater interest to Faculty
Blue - My additional comments

Attended:

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

Did not attend:

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

General Notes:

We are not yet precisely where we want to be in terms of Blackboard 7 performance. We are continuing to work with Blackboard consulting.

Related to this we have made a change in the way domains are populated. See note in VCCS Discuss: https://discuss.vccs.edu/scripts/discus/show.cgi?19/7687.html

We are looking at other domain changes, but right now we are keeping it as it is. We will need to test out the implications of the change made so far.

Blackboard 6 availability

Current plan is to disable Blackboard 6 on January 4. Our priority is to make sure hardware resources are available for Blackboard 7. Blackboard 6 may be temporarily revived at a later date after we are over the beginning of semester traffic peak.

Question: We can no longer see roles in bb7, so how do we check domain membership?
Answer: Right now users roles are not checked when it comes to domain membership so backup administrators will have access to all users (same as with My VCCS)
Question: How is the move going with colleges that are going early.
Answer: We haven’t started move yet due to other more pressing issues.
Question: What do you need for Organizations?
Answer: If you tell us nothing, we’ll move all your organizations. Feel free to identify organizations that should not be moved.
Question: Are there training “holes” that need filling?
Answer: Looking pretty good, but we’ll know for sure when faculty and students start paying attention. New sub-topic created on VCCS discuss for this.

Blackboard Upgrade Conference Call -12/11/07

2007-12-13T09:43:00.000-05:00

Red - Greater interest to Faculty
Blue - My additional comments

Attended:

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

Did not attend:

Dabney, Eastern Shore. Germanna, Mountain Empire, New River, Paul D. Camp, Rappahannock, Southwest, Tidewater

Outages

We are still working with Blackboard on fine-tuning the database and this is necessitating some short and not so short outages. We recognize the inconvenience, but this is critical work that must be done before students are on the system. Keep an eye on the outages distribution list for notices of outages: https://lists.vccs.edu/lists/listinfo/vccs-outages

Outage on Learn.vccs.edu - bb6

We have scheduled an outage on Thursday, 13^th December for learn.vccs.edu, from 12 a.m. to 4 a.m. Notices have been placed on learn.vccs.edu and my.vccs.edu.

Pirate language?

There were no objections to putting pirate language on blackboard 7. We’ll do this when it’s convenient. Obviously not a high priority.

Data Migration

ITS will generate a list of organizations and make a spreadsheet available to colleges for their review. This will include a “migrate now?” column.

All organization from TNCC will be migrated beginning Dec. 20, 2007. They should migrate with the students and faculty members. Be sure to check when you see it appear in your Bb 7 Organization Module. You may have to turn the module on by clicking on Modify Contents and then selecting My Organizations.

Single sign-on

We indicated that this might not work at Go Live. However, we think we have resolved this issue. There is a link on the test instance of My VCCS to test – https://dstst/vccs.edu/

CVCC is migrating early. Will their courses be ready by Dec 20?

We hope so. We would think so, but we can’t guarantee it.

What are Building block priorities?

Inez Farrell will coordinate. Not till first quarter of 2008.

What is the Bb6 lifetime?

Again, not 100% sure on this. Our priority as we begin the Spring semester will be Blackboard 7 performance. If it requires the resources that’s where we will put resources.

Do not count on having any access to Bb 6 after Dec. 20, 2007.

How will Bb6 archives be done?

The final archives will be made available in the usual fashion.

Although we “grab” archives periodically throughout the term and at the end of the term it is important that faculty download and safely store their own archives. If you need help with this process please contact Jan or me as soon as possible.

How will the data migration work for students and faculty?

Students: On December 20, when they log in to learn.vccs.edu (bb7), their Fall courses will not initially be there. Colleges may place a module on Blackboard 7 indicating that their courses may be on bb6.vccs.edu. When a course is migrated, it will disappear from Blackboard 6, and subsequently re-appear on Blackboard 7.

Faculty: As with students, except that they will see their courses on Blackboard 6 as unavailable. They should not make them available again. Courses will also have “moving to Blackboard 7” and “moved to Blackboard 7” tagged onto them as appropriate.

URLs

Bb7.vccs.edu will continue to work, so as not to break anything.

What’s new and report card modules

What’s new and report card modules have been made available to college roles. If a college wishes to disable them for their college, they should contact ITS to do so.

TNCC sees no reason to “disable” these new features. Jan will be doing training on them or you learn more about them by going to Atomic Learning. Let us know what you think about the features after you’ve used them.

Has anyone had any reports of Vista or IE7 issues?

No reports.

File size limits

There appears to be a limit on course imports of 250 MB. We have a ticket filed with Blackboard on this.

Please contact me (Ruth) if you get any error messages concerning size limits.

Bb7 quick enroll – bookmarklet

As previously noted, there is now no Quick Enroll feature. I’ve created a bookmarklet to go some of the way towards meeting this need.

http://bb7.vccs.edu/bbcswebdav/users/wccartd/pub/quickEnroll.html

NOTE: This bookmarklet is for administrators.

Wimba issue

Wimba migration continues to prove problematic. Migrated content will play but may not be editable.

Subscribe to forum

Email subscribe in discussion forums doesn’t appear to be working for some. It is working for most. This is quite probably a spam issue.

Is there an easy way to clear posts without deleting the actual forum?

Within a forum, you can display all items per page, then Select All, then Remove. Aside from that, it’s not clear.

Bb Conference Call - 12/4/2007

2007-12-10T11:15:00.000-05:00

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).

Notes on Blackboard Upgrade Conference Call - 11/28/2007

2007-11-30T11:56:00.000-05:00

Red - Greater interest to Faculty
Blue - My additional comments

Attended:

Blue Ridge, Central, Dabney, Danville, Germanna, John Tyler, Lord Fairfax, Northern, Piedmont, Rappahannock, Southside, System Office - Kathy,Thomas Nelson, Virginia Western, Wytheville

Question: Getting intermittent ‘Page not displayed’ error. Errors occur in IE, not Firefox.
Answer: Could be caused by the random, luck of the draw, choosing of a malfunctioning App Server. Please report when error occurs and we’ll check each App Server.

Question: Will migrating selected organizations, cause problems during mass migration?
Answer: Please give us a list of organizations previously migrated, and we’ll remove them from the mass migration.

Question: Problem with faculty, courses not going to default page.
Answer: This sounds like it might be specific to a course. Please post a ticket. However, generally speaking default pages are cached and users may need to log out, close their browser and then log in again before seeing changes.

If you have this problem you must email me (Ruth) your course id (TN293.XXX.XXX.XXX.SP08) you can see this code at the top of the page in the Control Panel. Please also include your Bb login in the email.

Question: Scripts not working as they did in Bb6. i.e. Course info. Colleges are particularly interested in tracking course size.
Answer: These are not currently working in Bb7, and the course size is no longer part of the properties screen. You could get an idea of the course size by looking at the archives, once they are turned on. We will investigate generating a report for colleges.

Question: Course ID script also not working in Bb7.
Answer: Right. This could be resolved either with a report or fixing the script. We will investigate both options.

Question: When will we be copying over the content system?
Answer: At Go live. Were we to do it before, then we would risk versions becoming out of sync.

December 20, 2007

Question: Will there be a link to Bb7 on my.vccs?
Answer: This has been discussed, but no decision has been made.

Question: We have a problem with the columns not being the proper width for the college tab.
Answer: Could be caused by content in a particular module, e.g. current weather conditions.

Question: Any update on Issue Trak #90344. When I try to modify items in Bb 7 that I previously created using Wimba in Bb 6, I receive the following error message:
500
We are sorry, but the system is experiencing technical difficulties : 437-1176726126143 does not start with prefix=_cvvs_
I am also unable to create a new podcast. When I try to setup a podcast, I receive the following error:
Please check your URL
/pvcc/pc not found
Answer: We’ll look into this. Update: Podcasting is fixed.

Question: When will we know which building blocks we’ll have access to?
Answer: There will be no more until 2008.

Question: We are having trouble un-enrolling a faculty member. Need to change role to student and then delete.
Answer: This can be accomplished through the course properties button at the system admin panel level.

Question: Will we have access to the Plagiarism tool?
Answer: This has not been evaluated yet.

Question: Will we have access to the Scholar building block?
Answer: This has not been evaluated yet.

Question: When will we begin archiving Bb7 courses?
Answer: Can’t yet say. At least by Dec. 20 go live.

Please Archive/Export things you are working on in Bb 7 (http://bb7.vccs.edu ) on a regular basis until Bb7 goes into production for students and the system office begins archiving again. They are still archiving Bb6 and we are grabbing them on a regular basis.

Question: How long will Bb admins have access to Bb6? This is helpful for comparing between instances.
Answer: We’ll look into this.

Question: Which modules will be placed on college tabs?
Answer: Colleges should not be adding modules to shared tabs.

Question: How will we move modules after go live?
Answer: They will need to be developed in test or another non-prod instance and then be moved.

Question: We are having trouble creating a training course.
Answer: Course creation can take a long time. Need to be patient.

Question: Will the Course tab stay or go away?
Answer: It will probably go away, based on input from DDLC.

Question: When ICA files are created, it grabs both primary and secondary instructors as primary.
Answer: Bb doesn’t recognize instructors as secondary. You need to edit the file before uploading.

Question: While training on Test Manager, notice that the save button opens up a popup window. This can be confusing to students.
Answer: Good catch. This is a training issue.

Jan will be addressing this in training - watch for her sessions on Testing or contact her if you have questions.

Question: Could there be a problem while creating a test and uploading a file from the content system, but the student doesn’t have access to the content system?
Answer: This is an interface problem. We will investigate to see if there is a solution.

Bb 7 Upgrade Conference Call - 11/13/2007

2007-11-15T12:05:00.000-05:00

Red - Greater interest to Faculty
Blue - My additional comments

Jan, David and I were out of town for this call.

Attended, or spoke with:

Central, John Tyler, Lord Fairfax, Northern, Southside, System Office – carol, Tidewater, Wytheville

Question: Still having trouble signing on while off campus.

Answer: Deleting cookies and cache helps. Not always. Could be App Server issue. Please report when the issue occurs to see if an App Server needs to be restarted.

Question: Will Bb7 have unlimited course size as does Bb6. Explore is limited.

Answer: Bb7 is currently set to unlimited. Will find out if this setting will remain.

Not to worry, the proposed size limit should not impact TNCC users. If they do impose size limits you would get a warning first. We (Jan, David, and I) cannot see this warning. If you were to get one, you would let me know (Ruth) ASAP so I can work to "expand" your quota.

Question: Would like to be introduced to staff supporting Blackboard.

Answer: While David is away, Applications and Client Services staff will step in and use resources to resolve issues. Will also be interviewing to fill vacant Applications staff position.

Question: We have trouble when using a template with the course creation wizard. End up with two course templates.

Answer: This may be a known issue. Will find out. Also suggested to use course copy instead of the wizard.

Question: Have there been any resolution to the tickets submitted with Blackboard?

Answer: Will find out.

Question: Categorizing courses doesn’t work when 5800 courses are set up. Could only process 200 at a time.

Answer: Will look into this.

Question: Being able to create dummy accounts, as raised in Issue #90006, is important to us.

Answer: I let it be known that this is an issue.

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

2007-11-06T12:20:00.000-05:00

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.

Welcome to Blackboard 7

2007-11-01T15:06:00.000-04:00

Go Live Plans

· November 1 – available to college networks

· November 5 – available universally to Faculty and Staff

· December 20 – switchover for learn.vccs.edu

It’s here!

Blackboard 7.3 is the latest version of the Blackboard Academic Suite. Faculty and Staff should now be able to access our new Blackboard from their campus networks. It is available at http://bb7.vccs.edu/ , the temporary URL until the December 20 switchover when it will become learn.vccs.edu.

What to do first…

Check the Courses that were migrated

Spring 2007 and Summer 2007 courses were brought over from Blackboard 6. They should all be unavailable. There are no student enrollments in these courses. There are no grades or work. Please review imported courses for any issues. There are some known problems with migrated Wimba content. Links you had to the Content System will not work.

What’s Left to Do?

The TNCC tab has a bare set of minimal modules placed on them. David and I are working to configure the modules, as blackboard administrators did not have advanced access to bb7.vccs.edu you will see changes in the tabs as we move forward.

Organizations will not be brought over until Go Live (December 20, 2007).

Create SU08 course shells

Re-create sandboxes

Load students into course shells

Import data from the Bb 6 content system

The Future

Building blocks – The system office (AS & R ) is working on piloting and testing building blocks for Blackboard 7 including: Learning Objects, Classtop and SafeAssign. These will not be available at Go Live, but we intend to deploy after testing in the first quarter of 2008.

TNCC tab has a bare set of minimal modules placed on them. David and I are working to configure the modules, as blackboard administrators did not have advanced access to bb7.vccs.edu

Organizations will not be brought over until Go Live (December 20, 2007).

FAQs

When can I request Spring 2008 course shells?
I am currently working on uploading Distance and Hybrid course shells first. If you are teaching DL or Hybrid you will not need to use the request form. For Distributed shells (supplement to F2F) please wait until I email you that I am ready to create these shells. I need to clear out the request database. If you request too soon you will have to do it again.

Where is my Sandbox?
Everyone will need a new sandbox. If you had a sandbox in explore.vccs.edu (the training Bb 7 instance) you will see a new blank sandbox in bb7.vccs.edu shortly. I will be re-creating them after I do DL and Hybrid shells. If you did not have a sandbox in explore.vccs.edu you will need to request one when I open up the request form for Distributed shells.

Do you move the data in my sandbox in learn.vccs.edu (Bb 6) and explore.vccs.edu (Bb 7 training)?
No, if you want any of the data in either of those sandboxes you will need to export and import the data you wish to retain.

What’s up with the Content System?
The data in the content system will be the last thing the system office will move. If you are a content system user, all of your links will appear to be broken in bb7.vccs.edu. This should correct itself when the URL changes from bb7.vccs.edu to learn.vccs.edu on December 20, 2007. There may be issues with permission but if so we will address this issue in a separate mailing. If you are not currently using the content system, I recommend you WAIT and not start using it until Jan does the content system training or after Dec. 20, 2007. If you can not wait until Dec. 20, 2007 to use the content system be sure to make folders with names you did not use in Bb 6 or when the system office migrates the content system to Bb 7 your data may be over-written.

When can I install a course cartridge
If it is a .zip package you can use it now. If it a code – wait until December 20, 2007 when the URL changes from bb7.vccs.edu back to learn.vccs.edu.

How do I report problems?
Email me. The subject line should begin with Bb7: followed by the problem. I have an outlook rule, flagging Bb7: so I can respond as quickly as possible.

How do I get help with Bb 7?

Searchable online documentation available at:
http://library.blackboard.com/ref/a157ea6f-5acf-46fb-92c4-0bf85f24f1ac/index.htm

The PDF version (1.54 mb) of the manual is attached.

Tutorials viewlets are also available from Atomic Learning:
http://movies.atomiclearning.com/highed/highedLogin: TNCC
Password: learn

Jan will be doing the Bb 7 training in workshops throughout November and December. She is also available for consultations by appointments.

I have students still making up work from Spring and/or Summer 2007; what do I need to do?
They will continue to work in Bb 6 (learn.vccs.edu) until the end of the FA07 term, but you will have to archive your own course for record keeping. If for some reason they are not finished by Dec. 20, 2007 follow the procedures for make-ups for the FA07 term.

What happens if I have make-ups for the FA07 term after December 20, 2007?
I will be sending special instructions closer to the end of the term for makes-up that pass the Dec. 20, 2007 date. I am still unclear about that procedure and need to get more clarification from the system office. But, try very hard to encourage your students to complete by Dec. 20, 2007 if at all possible!

When will my students be loaded into my Spring 2008 courses?
At the go live date: December 20 – when we the switchover from bb7.vccs.edu to learn.vccs.edu occurs. From the student’s perspective they will never know the juggling you had to do to prepare for the Spring term.

When will students have access to my Spring 2008 courses?
December 20, 2007 – provided you switch your course to “available”.

What happened to my students grades and submitted work from SP07 and SU07?
If you “forgot” to create your own archive – David Morales grabbed the files prior to the export/import to Bb7 (bb7.vccs.edu). These are the normal “emergency” back-ups. I STRONGLY recommend you archive each of your current courses in Bb6 (learn.vccs.edu) and keep the archived zip file in a safe place in case we need to restore. Only an administrator can do a restore but David’s “grab” is a blind backup and is 99.9% reliable. I also recommend you export any modules you may want to reuse. Jan will be doing workshops in November on archive, export and import.

What happens to "stuff" I created in explore.vccs.edu?
Since Bb7 (explore.vccs.edu) was a training environment. You will have to export/import anything you want to bring over to bb7.vccs.edu. Again, Jan will be doing workshops in November on archive, export and import.

Should I continue to use explore.vccs.edu?
Only to test things (play around). See the above bullet.

I am getting confused; which URL should I be working in?
http://learn.vccs.edu/ is the current Bb 6 production environment
http://explore.vccs.edu/ is the current Bb 7 training environmenthttp://bb7.vccs.edu/ is the temporary Bb 7 environment where you will be preparing your Spring 2008 courses

On December 20, 2008 http://bb7.vccs.edu/ will disappear and “magically” become http://learn.vccs.edu/ !

What happens to Bb6 (the current learn.vccs.edu) after December 20, 2007?
You will no longer have any access to that environment. Be sure you’ve backup (Archive and Exported) what you think you may need, as “insurance”.

Notes on Blackboard Upgrade Conference Call - 10/30/2007

2007-10-31T09:29:00.000-04:00

Red - Greater interest to Faculty
Blue - My additional comments

Posted on Tuesday, October 30, 2007 - 4:23 pm by
David Carter-Tod
ITS
Virginia Community College System
dcartertod@vccs.edu

Attended: Blue Ridge, Danville, Germanna, John Tyler, New River, Northern, Patrick Henry, Piedmont, Rappahannock, Tidewater, Southside, Thomas Nelson, Virginia Western, Wytheville, System Office.

Did not attend: Central, Dabney, Eastern Shore, J. Sargeant Reynolds, Lord Fairfax, Mountain Empire, Paul D. Camp, Southwest, Virginia Highlands

The call started by reviewing the Welcome to Blackboard 7 document, going over dates and issues. Blackboard administrators are strongly encouraged to review this document if they have not already.

Question: After Nov 1, after getting courses created using for example, a course creation file, do categories need to be done?
Answer: Yes, but it’s really easy to do. Availability is easy to do in the interface the same way.

Question: How can Dec 20 be both Go Live and a Blackout day?
Answer: It appears that there has been some kind of miscommunication. There will be no blackout period.

Question: Whoa! That’s a whole lotta tabs!?
Answer: You’re right. We will try to reduce them. We can investigate the feasibility of combining tabs at the college level, e.g. College Connect and Teach, but we are not sure how this might be done yet. We are open to ideas and would want to work through AS & R on this issue.

Question: What is the timing of course archives and statistics for fall 2007?
Answer: All Fall 2007 courses that are brought to Blackboard 7 will also be archived on the server where Blackboard administrators can get to them. Going forward, courses active after December 20 will be archived in the Spring 2008 section, regardless of the term identifier.

**If you find you will have make-ups for the FA07 term you will need to let me (Ruth Smith) know.

Question: When will content system files get moved?
Answer: Current plan is to move content system files later at the December Go Live, so that files on learn.vccs.edu (bb6) do not get out of synch with files on bb7.vccs.edu (bb7). If a faculty member needs to create files on the content system or move them, they can simply access both systems via WebDAV and copy content from one to the other (via their desktop).

When we do move content system content, please check permissions. It is unlikely that we will be able to reproduce permissions on Blackboard 7 precisely.

Question: When will “other” courses get migrated, e.g. organizations, .devl, .wrks, .tmpl?
Answer: If any of these courses can be moved before Go Live that would be preferable. Otherwise these will take a back seat to the migration of Fall 2007 courses. Colleges should communicate to learn@vccs.edu if they would like these courses migrated earlier than Go Live.

Question: Who places modules on college tabs?
Answer: Blackboard administrators may do this themselves.

Question: What exactly are the end user requirements and recommendations, e.g. with regard to Vista, XP, IE, CPU, RAM, etc.?
Answer: We will get the official Blackboard documentation on this. On review, this is on page 24 and 25 of the “Blackboard_Academic_Suite_New_Features_for_Release_7.3.pdf” document posted on VCCS Discuss (https://discuss.vccs.edu/scripts/discus/show.cgi?19/7266.html).

Question: After Dec 20, will system administrators have access to BB6?
Answer: Good question. We think so. There are some ongoing discussions about this internally about the most appropriate kind of access to provide after Dec 20, but yes, we think so.

Question: Can there be an FAQ tab for students?
Answer: We will work with AS & R on something like this. Perhaps on the Help tab?

Question: How will batch loading of courses work?
Answer: Same as ever. Joshua Seigler at PVCC wrote a nice guide to how to do this - http://learn.vccs.edu/bbcswebdav/users/jseigler8379/Bb/BatchCourseCopy-howto.doc

Question: Can we get a copy of the Administrator Manual?
Answer: We will post it to Discuss

Question: Can we get sample (dummy accounts) students – for instructors to use to evaluate their courses?
Answer: Please file an IssueTrak ticket requesting any manual accounts you need.

**I've already taken care of this you will use the same login: TNstudent and pw: (call for pw) as we did in Bb 6.

Note: Messaging is turned off in Blackboard 7.

Question: What is the Podcasting capability in Blackboard 7
Answer: Wimba Voice Tools at Go Live. Other building blocks, e.g. iTunesU may also enable this. Other building blocks are under active consideration, e.g. Classtop and Learning Objects.

Blackboard Upgrade Conference Call - 10/2/2007

2007-10-08T09:14:00.000-04:00

Red - Greater interest to Faculty
Blue - My additional comments

Attended: Central (could not speak), Danville, Germanna, John Tyler, Lord Fairfax, New River, Northern, Patrick Henry, Rappahannock, Southwest, Thomas Nelson, Virginia Highlands, System Office.

Did not attend: Blue Ridge, Dabney, Eastern Shore, J. Sargeant Reynolds, Mountain Empire, Paul D. Camp, Piedmont, Southside, Tidewater, Virginia Western, Wytheville

Question: Is it too late to get some Spring and Summer courses archived / restored ?
Answer: No. Please send us a list.

All of our Spring and Summer Courses are being exported. If you needed a specific course archived / restored you must call me ASAP.

Question: What about organizations?
Answer: Organizations will be archived/restored after Dec 20

Question: What is the status of explore.vccs.edu? Is it like production bb7?
Answer: It's not our official Test instance, and needs to be brought more in line with final production settings.

Question: Will students have the content system? What about messages?
Answer: Will check with AS & R on messages, but no content system for students.

Question: How will domains be configured?
Answer: One primary College Administrator will have access to data system-wide. Backups and other support functions will only have access to data within their college domain. This new College Administrator function will be restricted using privileges for access to elements that were previously restricted by documented procedures (e.g. Building Blocks management).

Question: Can colleges keep more than the current four semesters of data.
Answer: No. Old courses represent a drag on the performance of current courses.

Question: Will the various administrator utilities continue to work?
Answer: We cannot definitively answer this at this time. Joshua Siegler at PVCC rewrote some for Blackboard 6. Perhaps if you are nice to him? We urge administrators to review the Blackboard 7 interface since some things may now be possible in the GUI that were not previously possible, e.g. the GUI has a method for making multiple courses available or unavailable.

Question: What about TMPL, DEVL and WRKS courses?
Answer: Good point. We will include these in our post-Dec 20 migration.

Question: What about other kinds of courses, e.g. NVCC has some hybrid repositories which are still coded as NS99
Answer: ITS will attempt to facilitate all kinds of migrations. Typically all colleges need to do is to provide a list of course IDs. These custom migrations will take a lower priority unless there are good reasons why not.

Question: Will there be a web site for the Blackboard migration, aside from posts to VCCS Discuss? It would be useful to have something staff could be pointed to.
Answer: We will continue to post to VCCS Discuss and talk to Client Services about a web presence. Helpnet is currently in transition and we hope to create a significant Blackboard presence on a newly designed Helpnet site. We do not have a date for this however.

Question: We have previously had issues with accent marks in foreign languages during migrations - can we review and make sure there are no issues in 7?
Answer: We will test, but Bb7 is explicitly designed for multiple languages so we are hopeful that there will be no issues.

Question: Will colleges need to insert instructors into exported courses.
Answer: No. ITS will take care of this.

Question: What about course cartridges and building blocks from publishers?
Answer: Building blocks will generally be deferred until after the beginning of the Spring semester. An advantage in Blackboard 7 is the ability to install building blocks but have them off by default in courses. This appears to be a good solution for publisher building blocks.

Question: How will the content system migration be done?
Answer: Best advice at this point is to wait to copy content over until after student Go Live. ITS will facilitate this. Faculty and staff can add brand new content prior to that as long as use they use folder names unique to the Blackboard 7 system (i.e. so that they don’t get overwritten in any migration process). Note that we may face similar issues with Wimba content.

Question: What about the day of the switchover?
Answer: On the day of the switchover, learn.vccs.edu will simply point to the new system, not the old one (which will still be available at bb6.vccs.edu). Fall 2007 courses will not be immediately available on the new system, but will be migrated over as quickly as possible, starting with those courses that have incompletes. A guesstimate is that the migration of courses with incompletes might take half a day. ITS will make a good faith effort to identify those courses in SIS and correlate them to courses in Blackboard, but given that there are not always a one-to-one match between the systems, colleges are encouraged to identify such courses themselves and send the information to ITS. After incompletes, Fall 2007 courses will be migrated college by college.

Question: Can Blackboard administrators get access prior to faculty and staff seeing it?
Answer: ITS has fairly widely publicized the November 1 Go Live for Faculty and Staff. This date is probably not negotiable, but Blackboard administrators have discretion at their own college in terms of how they publicize the availability of the new system.

Question: Blackboard Community/Portal system: who will move tabs and modules, and will they continue to work the same way?
Answer: General idea (barring better ones) is to reproduce the same structure and procedures as in version 6. However, tab and module administration can be delegated to some extent in the domain context. There is no ideal solution to moving modules from 6 to 7. Current plan is to leave this in the hands of college staff to do during the November/December time frame.

Question: What about portal pages that rely on the content system (e.g. for images)
Answer: Should not be a problem. Just reproduce on Blackboard 7. Copying Content System content is fairly straightforward. Simply drag and drop the webdav folder to desktop and from desktop to the new system. Then check permissions.

Question: Is the menu ordering problem when copying courses fixed?
Answer: Yes

Question: Will all the mime types be on Blackboard 7?
Answer: Yes

Question: What is the compatibility with Vista and IE7?
Answer: This is part of the reason we chose 7.3, which claims to resolve most if not all such issues.

Question: Does CD / offline content work?
Answer: This has been inherently problematic ever since browsers like IE and Firefox become more security conscious. Not entirely sure, but wouldn’t raise expectations.

Question: Manual accounts for adjuncts and students?
Answer: For adjuncts in defined training purposes, this is allowed with appropriate tracking and documentation, using e.g. LFCCTrain01 as an account name. However, such accounts should not be used long term, and the correct way to get into Blackboard is via SIS. Students should never have manual accounts and should be driven by SIS data.

Question: Does iframe content work okay?
Answer: Yes, it should. We are still planning on implementing SSL and this might impact references to external sites. Please test.

Question: Can a college administrator change their role in a course?
Answer: Because the new College Administrator role is not a System Administrator, they will not have access to the Quick Enroll feature in the standard course menu. However, the interface for accessing and enrolling users into courses on the System Admin control panel has been streamlined so that enrollment and the role assignment can be done on the same screen.

Question: Given that many people will be on the road to the October 9 training, will it still go ahead?
Answer: Yes, and we will try and record next week's call. It may well be a short call.

Migration Update

2007-09-25T21:13:00.000-04:00

Sent: Monday, September 24, 2007 9:48 AM
To: learn@vccs.edu

We (TNCC) are currently training folk in Bb 7. I want to make sure I am giving out as accurate information as possible. Could you please confim or correct:

explore.vccs.edu is a training environment (no "real" work for SP08 should take place there unless the individual instructor exports their work themselves)
SP07 and SU07 courses are being migrated to a non-public instance of Bb 7( which will later become the production server). The migration began on Sept. 15th; if an instructor does any work or make-ups in these terms they must export/archive their changes themselves. If its an export they can import when the Bb 7 server goes into production.
The non-public instance of Bb 7 will be available for faculty (no students) on Nov. 1, 2007. (Will this then become explore.vccs.edu?)
SP08 Bb shells can not be created until after Nov. 1, 2007.

Thank you,
---
Ruth K. Smith
Senior Instructional Designer
Learning System Administrator

Sent: Monday, September 24, 2007 2:37 PM
From: David Carter-Tod

Ruth,

1. Correct

2. That's correct, although for Faculty bb7 will be available after Nov 1 so that's when they could bring data over themselves.

3. Correct, but no, it will not be explore.vccs.edu. The interim url for Blackboard 7 production before students get on it will be bb7.vccs.edu

4. They can't be created in bb7 until after then (unless created on explore). If they were created on Bb6, faculty or the bbadmin could export and import to bb7 if they so desired, but at this point in time, we have not undertaken to do that for colleges.

HTH
David

Summary:

If you make or have made any changes in SP07 or SU07 courses after Sept. 15th (had students doing make up for example) you will have to do your own Export/Archive to have the updated content appear in Bb 7.
I cannot make any SP08 course shells until after November 1, 2007.
The pre-production URL (listed in David C-T's resoponse) is active yet.
I am still trying to find out how they will be handling .DEVL shells. There is a Bb admin. meeting on Oct. 9, 2007; I hope to have more information for you after the meeting. Right now everything is "lovely, lovely".

If you have questions or concerns please feel free to contact me.

Archival Migration information available at:
http://nl.tncc.edu//blogs/index.php?blog=5&Itemid=93 (searchable)

Blackboard 7 Upgrade Update

2007-08-17T16:16:00.000-04:00

Bb Migration Timeline - Additional Dates for time line:

11/01/07–batch upload students into Bb 7.2 for SP08 unavailable to faculty until after 12/20/07. (Faculty won’t be able to email their SP08 students until after 12/20/07.
11/01/07–DO NOT load course cartridges until after 11/01/07 for SP08 courses
12/20/07–content system won’t be linked up (all links to content system will appear to fail –but will correct itself at GoLivedate
12/07/07–end of incompletes for FA07 (all FA07 incompletes must be made up
12/20/07 –faculty and students will no longer see FA07 courses in Bb 6 (http://learn.vccs.edu/)
12/20/07–there will be a short blackout period (1 to 5 days) for incompletes (exclusion FA07 courses –these will already be gone) and MedLab(non-traditionally scheduled courses).
01/04/08–Bb 6.2 retired (no longer available to faculty, students or Bb administrators.)
–Normal backup archives still available to Bb administrators.

Training focus for faculty (recommendation):

Discussion board
Announcements -immediate email notification
What’s New Module
Adaptive Release, review status, and performance dashboard
Early Warning system

Things faculty need to know:

Java
-Java 6 must be loaded prior to a student taking a test or the browser locks the 1st time
-Java 6 can take up to 1 hour to download on a dial up modem.
Content System
-12/20/07 –content system won’t be linked up (all links to content system will appear to fail –but will correct itself at GoLivedate
-Don’t use content system for NEW classes SP08 until after 12/20/07.
E-Mail
-Messages sent to students from instructor now include course ID in the subject line.
Course Cartridges
-11/01/07 –DO NOT load course cartridges until after 11/01/07 for SP08 courses

News from the System Office:

From: Inez Farrell ,Director of Instructional Technology, VCCS
Sent: Fri 8/17/2007

ITS has agreed to upgrade Blackboard to7.3 instead of 7.2 using the same timeline.

Benefits of 7.3 over 7.2

Full Microsoft Vista support: while 7.2 is generally compatible withVista, 7.3 is Blackboard-certified for Vista. For college computers and anystudents buying computers this is a critical issue.
Revised Discussion Board: a major client complaint about the 7.xreleases has been the rewritten discussion board. End users (faculty andstudents) have found it difficult to use. 7.3 includes a revised UI thatresolves these difficulties and is more similar to the historical discussionboard that users are used to.
Integrated Content System archiving: For 6.2 in order to ensure theintegrity of archived courses, ITS had to write a custom archive process forlinked content system content. In 7.3 this functionality is shipped withBlackboard in such a way that respects content system meta-data.
Performance Enhancements and fixes

There should be no negative impact on training. The discussion board changegives instructors the option of using the more historic version over thenewer version.

ITS will now plan to upgrade Explore (http://explore.vccs.edu/) so you will all be familiar with the changes.

Bb Upgrade Timeline

2007-06-21T19:17:00.000-04:00

Blackboard Upgrade Timeline (.pdf)

DDLC Meeting Minutes - May 24, 2007

2007-06-06T14:32:00.000-04:00

Distance and Distributed Learning ASAC Workgroup

Meeting Minutes

May 24, 2007 10am – 3pm

I. Call to order

Kim Blosser called to order the regular meeting of the DDLC at 10:00 am on May 24, 2007 in Featherstone.

II. Roll call

Kim Blosser conducted a roll call. The following persons were present:

Kim Blosser (BRCC), Charles Boling (VHCC), CJ Bracken (GCC), Joan Trabandt (NVCC), George Hoffman (LFCC), Kristen Kelly (JTCC), Leslie Smith (RCC), Ramona Coveny (VWCC), Ruth Smith (TNCC), Jaime Shetrone (WCC), Inez Farrell (VCCS - AS&R), Shelia Hobbs (PDCCC), Colleen Kehoe (JSRCC), Jeff Burleson (MECC), Linda Claussen (NRCC), Ken Fairbanks (SwVCC), Scott Case (ITS), Susan Wood (VCCS - AS&R)

Members absent: Susan Beasley (CVCC), Bill Dey (DCC), Mark Nelson (PHCC), Lori Ledford (PVCC), Reo McBride (DLCC), Richard Wilt (ESCC), John Ambrose (JSRCC)-(Colleen subs for him) John Zwick (TCC), Joan Tuck (SVCC), Joan Osborne (LFCC)

III. Approval of minutes from last meeting

Kim Blosser read the minutes from the last meeting (2/07). The minutes were approved as read.

IV. Open issues

a) Inez Farrell presented a sample of a published DL survival kit for faculty. This can be enhanced with best practices and published on the DDLC web site.

b) Inez Farrell announced that college presidents will select the DDLC representative for their college as a yearly appointment. There is a job description for the DL representatives. The description for the DDLC chairperson was also provided.

c) A tentative calendar was created for DDLC meetings in 2007-2008:
September 6, 2007 Piedmont Community College

November 8, 2007 (backup date of November 15)

February 7, 2008 (Joan Trabandt will setup Centra meeting so travel is not necessary)

May 14, 2008

d) Several attendees shared effective communication strategies with the group.

e) Inez Farrell reported that the DDLC Peer Group meeting would be October 17,19 and would include Library Services and Blackboard Administrators. Wimba training may be available at the meeting.

f) Inez Farrell reported on status of Backpack and Atomic Learning and will investigate CampusPack and SurveyTool. The system will be previewing LockDown Browser for one year. The Respondus contract includes StudyMate. SoftChalk will remain available.

g) The GIS announcement was sent to each designated college contact on May 23, 2007. DL staff may contact that person to get software if they wish.

h) The VCCS is pursuing a state-wide agreement for iTunes.edu.

i) The group was encouraged to use surveys to determine which software is being used to assist in system decision for purchasing and continuing software contracts. Impatica, Auto Desk, and SoftChalk are three such software products that will need to be reviewed this year as the contract expires.

j) Scott Case from ITS proposed that Explore.vccs.edu (Blackboard 7.1) be upgraded to Blackboard 7.2 on May 25. He explained that the technicians would need a short time frame that Explore.vccs.edu would not be available. The proposal was accepted by the group so Explore.vccs.edu was upgraded on that date.

k) Inez Farrell presented the timeline for the upgrade of Blackboard 7.2 for the entire system for the implementation and upgrade of Blackboard in Spring 2008.

l) The approval of the revised, renamed, and rewritten document of guidelines for distance and distributed learning (previously VDEN) brought a lively discussion. The result of the discussion was that a survey should be created that included a different structure than the previous survey instrument. The survey should have categories (i.e. heard of this or do you use). Each item should have some means of displaying a short description of each software item. Another item to be included could be “What do you want to be able to do that you currently cannot do?” Main category items were:
SoftTalk Impatica Respondus
Wimba StudyMate LockDown Browser
GIS AutoDesk Merlot
Other:
Web Conferencing (Breeze, Elluminate, Centra)
Flash Paper Articulate BackPack
Atomic Learning SurveySoftware Captivate/Camtasia
Podcasting

m) VDEN Work Distribution and Suggested Formats – There should be an intro page with the named target audience and purpose. An agreement between providers and receivers and responsibilities of each which will also include contact information. There should be links to current “Best Practices” from individual faculty and colleges. The three main areas are procedures, compensation and MOU.

n) Guidelines for Quality Assurance (Best Practices) would include:
1. Evaluations (faculty and courses)
Include what should be included in each course as basic structure
Suggested additions to syllabus, etc
2. Accessibility information
3. Listing of system-wide instructional software
4. Assessment strategies (include example proctored activities)
5. Key terms
6. Contact information (w/person links)
7. Student Services (tutoring, admissions, orientation modules, etc)
8. Advising (faculty modules)

o) A motion was passed that stated that each college would send a table of contents for their current faculty DL manual to Inez by the following week. All the members of the group agreed to volunteer for a section and provide tentative material for the September 6 meeting.

V. New business

p) There were no new business items.

VI. Adjournment

Kim Blosser adjourned the meeting at 2:45 pm.

Minutes submitted by: Ramona Coveny

Minutes approved by:

Distance and Distributed Learning ASAC Workgroup

2007-05-18T17:06:00.000-04:00

Distance and Distributed Learning ASAC Workgroup
February 15, 2007, 10am – 3pm

Minutes
Meeting called to order at 10:00 am

Members present: Susan Beasley (CVCC), Kim Blosser (BRCC), Charles Boling (VHCC), Joan Trabandt (NVCC), Kristen Kelly (JTCC), Leslie Smith (RCC), Ramona Coveny (VWCC), Ruth Smith (TNCC), Stacy Harris (SWCC), Joan Tuck (SVCC), Jaime Shetrone (WCC), Bill Dey (DCC), Inez Farrell (AS&R), Shelia Hobbs (PDCCC), David Carter-Tod (ITS)

Members absent: Mark Nelson (PHCC), Lori Ledford (PVCC), George Hoffman (LFCC), Reo McBride (DLCC), Jeff Burleson (MECC), Ron Wilt (ESCC), Linda Claussen (NRCC), John Ambrose (JSRCC), John Zwick (TCC),

Action Item 1.

Recommendation to Educational Technology Committee of ASAC for elimination of outdated VDEN procedures.

Background: The policies and procedures developed by VCCS and college administrators for distance learning were created to ensure the quality of this course delivery method. The method most in use during the creation of this document was compressed video. Other methods of delivery are now primary. The DDLC has been charge by the Education Technology Committee of ASAC to determine the following:

Recommend what sections of the VDEN procedures should be considered by ASAC to be added to policy.

Determine what sections are already in policy and recommend for deletion.

Ascertain what remains in the VDEN that is valuable and should be incorporated into either:
1. MOU
2. Best Practices
3. Other

Action Recommended: Review Section IV of VDEN and determine whether any parts that are already covered in the Policy Manual should be eliminated and if any parts should remain and be incorporated into the Policy Manual.

Rationale: Changes in distance learning delivery methods and the increased awareness that all delivery methods of content should follow the same quality criteria necessitate the updating of this procedural document.

At the meeting, much time was spent discussing what the VDEN document is and what it’s purpose should be within the VCCS. Several members indicated that it was used as a procedures guide and was still very helpful to many. Others still noted that the information was outdated and certainly needed to be updated.

During the previous DDLC meeting, small groups worked to recommend which parts of the document needed to be eliminated or revised. This information had not been captured in a format that could be sent out to the entire DDLC membership, so some time was spent re-creating those recommendations. Google docs were used to collaborate on the specific parts of the VDEN document. For the next meeting in May, the revisions that were proposed in this meeting will be distributed for further review.

The main charge for this committee was to determine whether or not any of the language in the VDEN document needed to be moved to the policy manual (recommended that it be moved) or how in fact it would best be modified to make it current and effective. The committee agreed that the document was valuable and needed to be considered a Procedures Manual. As a result, the committee agreed on the following motion:

Motion:
The Distance and Distributed Learning Committee (DDLC) recommends that the VDEN document as it stands contains no reference to policy that is not already covered in the VCCS policy manual, but is an outdated reference guide for procedures and best practices. The DDLC requests it be allowed to rework the VDEN into a current set of E-learning procedures and best practices for Virginia’s Community Colleges.

This motion will be sent to the next ASAC meeting for response by the Educational Technology subcommittee. The hope of the DDLC is that we will be asked to revise this document so that it can remain an effective procedures document for those working with distance education.

Discussion Item 1.

Develop a calendar of dates for ITS to add and delete student email account or Blackboard account to the system for each semester. (When do the courses come on and when do they come off. When does the email account get activated, when does it get deleted).

Background: ITS needs help in determining the best time to add or delete student email accounts and Blackboard accounts to the system.

Action Recommended: Formulate a system-wide calendar to present toTech Council in March.

ITS indicated that they needed firm dates for when to delete email accounts from the system, as well as a process by which students are notified that their account will be terminated. Although this was initially a discussion item, this led to discussions about coming up with dates and was therefore moved to an Action Item.

After much discussion, the motion was as follows:

Email accounts to be de-authorized:

3rd Thursday after August 16, January 2, and May 16.

Email authorization:

July 1, November 1, and April 1.

Course de-activation:

December 15, August 15, and May 1.

Dates to flag:

December 1, July 15, and April 15.

There was an email later asking that ITS ‘flag’ accounts at least 4 weeks in advance, which David indicated was not a problem. ITS was more concerned with the deactivation process than when the accounts are flagged and sent a notice.

Information Item 1.

WIMBA update

Inez updated the group regarding the feedback she’s received on the WIMBA pilot project. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. ASAC is expected to approve the inclusion of WIMBA as an add-on to Blackboard system-wide.

Information Item 2.

Backpack pilot status from Leslie Smith

Leslie Smith reported that Ruth Greene (RCC) has been piloting another Blackboard building block called Backpack. They currently have a 30-day free trial version. The add-on allows students to download all the course material, with the exception of those items that are interactive such as quizzes, discussion boards, and assignments (etc). Anything not interactive gets downloaded and students can then review documents, PowerPoint presentations, etc without having to connect to BB. For students with a dial-up connection, this is very helpful.

Leslie and Ruth are looking for funding to continue the pilot so that they can share their results. Inez encouraged them to contact the rep for Backpack to see if they would be willing to allow RCC to pilot this for possible inclusion by more VCCS schools.

Information Item 3.

Blackboard 7 Update

As of this meeting, ITS is still planning for a fall 07 go live date. Further details will be forthcoming in regards to training and specific timelines.

Old BB COURSES TO BE DELETED MAY 7, 2007!!!!!

2007-04-19T09:39:00.001-04:00

http://community.tncc.edu/faculty/smith/blog_docs/coursesToBeDeleted-May2007.xls

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT YOU READ THIS CAREFULLY AND UNDERSTAND IT (original VCCS message at bottom). THE COURSES ON THE ATTCHED SPREADSHEET WILL BE AUTOMATICALLY DELETED ON MAY 7, 2007. THE LIST CONTAINS THE OLD SP06 COURSES BUT

IT ALSO CONTAINS ALL OF YOUR SANDBOXES!!!

You must export your sandbox content immediately and request a .devl sandbox to import your old sandbox content into.

To request a .devl sandbox email me with your sandbox id
TN293.Sandbox.??? (you can see the ID on the Control Panel) and your
Bb login do not use the request form.

As a reminder Jan Klingberg will be presenting workshops on Ending the Semester and Moving Content in Bb6

Tuesday April 24, 2007 917 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Tuesday April 24, 2007 917 02:00 pm – 03:00 pm
Wednesday April 25, 2007 917 08:30 am – 09:30 am
Thursday April 26, 2007 917 11:30 am – 12:30 pm

Posted on Discuss
Author: David Carter-Tod
Wednesday, April 18, 2007 - 11:34 am:

At the end of the Fall 2006 semester we deleted courses from Fall 2005 and before. You can read the relevant thread here:

https://discuss.vccs.edu/scripts/discus/show.cgi?19/5852.html

It is now time to remove all Spring 2006 courses and before. All Spring 2006 (and prior) courses will be removed from the production Blackboard environment on May 7, 2007.

The criteria for removal at this stage is:

1. Course ID ending in "SP06"
2. Or created before January 1, 2006

Per ASAC policy, colleges should also poll faculty to identify other courses on the production blackboard system that are eligible for removal from the production system.

Procedure:
- April 18, 2007 — Courses are identified to Blackboard Administrators (list is attached to this message as an Excel file)
- April 23, 2007 — Title of courses is changed to included "Will delete 7 May 2007" and
courses are made unavailable
- All courses are archived (this is an ongoing standard procedure)
- May 7, 2007 — all flagged courses will be removed from production
- Archived courses are available on ITS servers until May 2008 at http://chat.vccs.edu/vccs-archives/

------------------
Preserving courses
------------------
Blackboard is not designed as a permanent historical archive of course activity. It is a production system for current classes. Keeping old courses, especially those with student data such as test attempts, can have a negative effect on the performance of the system for current courses and
current students. This is why all courses are constantly archived and then eventually removed, so that if they need to be restored for current production purposes they can be, but otherwise they do not adversely impact performance.

Blackboard administrators should review the current course ID standards (in the Blackboard documentation - https://discuss.vccs.edu/scripts/discus/show.cgi?19/3922.html). In addition to the four semesters of current courses, faculty may have one .DEVL space for working on content and other experimentation, and they may, of course, have courses that have IDs for
future courses.

In that light, the necessary procedure for keeping a course is to copy it to a more current and appropriate ID. This would apply if for some reason the course still had active users. The recommended approach is:

1. Make the original unavailable
2. Do a Copy Course with Users (Exact Copy) to the new course ID format
3. Make the new course available

If the course should really be a DEVL space for a faculty member, i.e. it is being kept for the content, it will significantly benefit the overall performance of the system to copy the course content without users (to clean out assessment and other student data).

If colleges require an exception, for example for an uncopyable cartridge-based course
that students still require access to, please file an IssueTrak ticket including the course id and reason.

Thanks
David

David Carter-Todd
ITS
Virginia Community College System

Instructional Technology Notice: Upgrade to Bb7 Now Scheduled for Spring 2008

2007-04-09T18:40:00.000-04:00

Mon 4/9/2007 5:14 PM

To VCCS Vice Presidents and Provosts,

Over the last six months, the VCCS Information Technology Services (ITS)staff has negotiated with Blackboard in an attempt to meet long-term VCCS goals of high reliability and robust, high performing technology at thelowest possible cost. This extensive effort involving IBM, Blackboard, andOracle was concluded in the last week. The goal was to enable the VCCS to incorporate Blackboard services into its new computer architecture aclustered environment running on IBM's AIX operating system. A clustered computing environment allows tremendous flexibility as well as an inexpensive and relatively easy method to add processing power as required. Unfortunately, due to myriad non-technical factors, Blackboard has declined to certify the IBM environment as requested.

The VCCS must acquire additional hardware that is certified by Blackboard inorder to provide essential support for the Blackboard 7.2 environment. As a result, the upgrade to version 7.2 of Blackboard will go live in Spring 2008.

VCCS Academic Services and Research will continue to work with ITS to prepare Blackboard System Administrators for the upgrade, with training scheduled to begin June 25, 2007. Instructional Technologists will continueto train faculty in the use of enhanced Blackboard 7.2 tools, such as the discussion board. Additional information and a schedule for testing andother key milestones will be made available in the next few weeks.

Please share this notice with deans, faculty, instructional technologists, and others as appropriate at your college. Questions should be directed to Dr. Inez Farrell, Director of Instructional Technology (ifarrell@vccs.edu).

Thank you,
Inez Inez Farrell, Ph.D.
Director of Instructional Technology
Virginia's Community Colleges
101 North 14th Street
Richmond, VA 23219

Dealing with Office 2007 files

2007-04-07T16:55:00.000-04:00

PROBLEM:
I can't open a .docx or .docm file!

BACKGROUND:
Microsoft Word 2007 is using a new file extension, *.docx, as its default for new documents. This new format, along with *.docm, are incompatible with older versions of Microsoft Word.

SOLUTION:
If You are Trying to Open a *.docm or *.docx File:

There may be times when you must view a *.docx or *.docm file. If you are using Microsoft Office 2000, 2002 or 2003, you will need to install the Microsoft Office 2007 Compatibility Pack. Users of earlier versions of Microsoft Office cannot use the Compatibility Pack. If you are using an older version of Word, we recommend that you contact the author of the document and have them convert it into a different format (.doc or .pdf).

Go to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-C6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en
Download the Microsoft Office 2007 Compatibility Pack

You can read more about the Compatibility Pack at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/HA100444731033.aspx

WHAT TO TELL THE STUDENTS WHO USE OFFICE 2007:
We recommend that you convert your *.docx and *.docm files into *.doc files. Here's how:

Open the file in Word 2007
Select File
Select Save As...
From the drop-down menu called File Type, select Word Document (*.doc)
Click Save

The file will be saved with an extension of doc and users of Microsoft Word 2000, 2002 and 2003 will be able to open it.

Migration Q&As from VCCS

2007-04-07T15:33:00.000-04:00

These answers are subject to change based on input from the VCCS workgroup

FACULTY

1. What will faculty need to do to prepare for the fall 2007 upgrade?
Faculty need to prepare their courses to be copied as they would for any semester. Clean up any courses that are not current. It would be extremely helpful to un-enroll students from old courses if their data is not any longer necessary.

2. What should their timeline look like?
Faculty should have their courses ready to be exported by May 10, 2007.

3. What new Blackboard 7 enhancements need faculty training?
The discussion board is the most widely used change. The dashboard, Wimba, early warning system, and adaptive release are cool new tools but faculty can do business as usual without training in these areas.

4. Will current content be batch copied to production Bb7? If so, will this be tested beforehand so that any issues might be planned for?
Yes the content system will be automatically copied. This will be tested and there are some questions outstanding as to whether the links will still work. We think they will but must test.

5. What is the status of Blackboard 7 for the summer (will faculty be able to continue piloting or will it become a playground for training)?
19 colleges responded to the survey. Three colleges would prefer to continue the pilot. Sixteen colleges preferred to train and experiment. We will use Explore for training and experimenting beginning May 10, 2007. Students who are still in Explore with incompletes will continue their work in that environment. All other courses will no longer be active.

6. If you keep it for piloting, how are we supposed to do training?
See question 5.

7. What is going to happen with the instructors who developed courses in Bb 7.1 this SP07 semester? Are we requiring that they copy their course back to Bb 6 if teaching in the summer after using the tools in Bb 7.1?
Courses cannot be brought from Blackboard 7 to Blackboard 6. Instructors can have a course archive from the pilot that their Blackboard Admin can put on the new system.

8. I have faculty who are asking to create courses now for FA07 with course cartridges to develop over the summer. If we use Bb 7.2 as a training environment how will a course copy over with a cartridge from Bb 6 to Bb7?
Course cartridges often do not copy within a system, let alone across systems. Faculty should develop content in a separate course area from the cartridge content in case it does not copy (licensing again). In this way a new cartridge key can be applied to the course in 7.2 and the work done by the faculty member can also be applied to that course (via import or restore). It is recommended you communicate the following to faculty: If you are using a course cartridge that is copy protected (most with a key are like this) you should plan to begin working with your course after July 1, 2007. If you are using a course cartridge that is a zip file (your Blackboard system administrator will know the difference if you do not) you can create your course content and modify the cartridge as you have done in the past on Blackboard 6. These courses will be exported and imported without problems. Course cartridges that are copy protected will not import.

STUDENTS

1. What will students need to do to prepare for the fall 2007 upgrade?
Generally, nothing. Blackboard provides good tutorial videos and documentation in 7.2. Students will not need any other preparation for the upgrade.

2. What are new Blackboard 7 enhancements for which students need training?
Students may need training on the discussion board. Faculty may want to alert students to the new early warning system.

3. What happens to students that need to access the courses that were piloted for SP07 due to incompletes?
The courses will be available on Explore. And then can be migrated over to production at the instructor's and college Blackboard admin's discretion. If the student finishes the course after May 10, 2007 then the admin will need to archive and restore the course to the new production system.

TRAINING

1. Will there be a training committee formed that will consolidate training materials for each Bb Admin / Instructional Technologists to use at their college?
Training material is provided by Blackboard. Training specifically created for Blackboard Administrators and for Instructional Technologists to use for their faculty will be compiled and stored either in Blackboard or on the ITDE website. You vote.

INTEGATION

Full integration with PeopleSoft, which includes the automatic creation of courses and enrollment of students and instructors into those courses, will not occur this Fall. A workgroup on integration of Blackboard and PeopleSoft will be convened to discuss the design. Code will be written as soon as a design conclusion is reached. Integration is expected to begin summer 2008.

1. When will integration with PeopleSoft take place?
Plan is for summer 2008.

2. What are the plans for centralized automatic course creation in the fall of 07? Is it a go or not?
No go!

3. Will courses be created and integrated with PeopleSoft automatically?
Yes, when integration is implemented.

4. What will happen if a course is created and not assigned an instructor? (staff)
Determined with input from workgroup

5. What happens if a course is created and then the instructor is changed?
Determined with input from workgroup

6. If a course is automatically created, an instructor assigned who loads content, and then the instructor is changed, will the content be cleared?
Determined with input from workgroup

7. After integration sections can be automatically combined at a college’s request. Does ITS then do the combining? What is the turn around time needed? Can Bb admins do the combining?
Section combining will be handled by the user interface. Blackboard administrators can do this.

8. How will course templates work? Currently colleges that use templates have to request the system office create their courses with the template the college submits. Will this be the same or different?
The same until integration. After integration the templates will need to be tied to the course creation. This is a question for the workgroup to discuss.

9. Is it true: Integration of a course cannot prevent Blackboard Administrators or faculty from manually adding additional users in a non-student role to that course.
This is correct. Other users can be added to an integrated course in other roles. Work group will address use cases of when non-enrolled citizens need to be added to a course.

10. A standard course naming convention will be used that includes: Semester—Course ID—Section Number—Course Name—College
Correct. ASAC certified a naming convention. The current common course ID format will continue to be used, which typically includes College ID.Subject.Number.Section.Semester
Other valid course ID formats are for:
Personal faculty development spaces - College ID.facultyid.DEVL
Training courses - College ID.workshopInfo.WRKS
College-level template courses - College ID.optionalInfo.TMPL. Template courses are NOT subject nor faculty specific. Faculty get one personal development space for creating content to be reused in other courses.

11. Students will be disabled as a user in Blackboard when they are backed out of the PeopleSoft course for any reason. Can ITS show the reason the student is out of PeopleSoft to the admins?
A student's enrollment in the relevant course would be disabled within the parameters defined by the workgroup. ITS might be able to reveal this information, but appropriate PeopleSoft access is a decision for colleges

12. Can a Bb admin be able to turn students back on manually while issues are being resolved?
Not necessarily. ITS would have to build an interface, but this is also a question of policy. SIS is the system of record

Blackboard Administrators

1. Is Blackboard Admin training necessary? Mandatory?
Blackboard admin training is necessary.

2. When will it take place?
Training to take place during June 25th to 29th. We will train at John Tyler’s Chester Campus (Bird Hall, room B142) and at Greenfield. Training will last one day. The training from June 25 to 29th will be for the 23 Administrators and 37 Domain Administrators.

3. What will it cover?
Training will cover managing your college domain and creating course templates. User roles, modules

4. Are we going to start out using the domains feature and if so, will the colleges have input on the policies and procedures for managing domains?
Yes, we are, and yes, they will. The procedures for managing domains will be determined by a committee of seven instructional technologists representing the 23 colleges. No policy will be determined except by ASAC. Role permissions will require some input from this committee. We will use Google docs to survey the other colleges for their ideas.

The current design goal is for 23 primary admins with super user access (one per college). Backup admins will not have this level of access, but only domain-level access. Colleges will be able to have as many admins as they want within their domains.

5. What will Blackboard Admins need to do to prepare for upgrade?
ITS will automatically migrate all courses that conform to the ID standards and fall within the ASAC definition of courses to be retained in production. For portal migration, Blackboard Admins will need to update their tracking spreadsheet with portal modules and layout identifying the ones they want to migrate by May 1, 2007

It may be useful to refer to your log of manually created users to make sure that is up to date as you will have to recreate the ones that you intend to keep using

It will be useful to facilitate clean-up of courses that will be migrated (Fall 06 and forward).

Summer 07 courses will remain on the current learn server until the course end date. Those courses will be identified by the Blackboard Admin. If there is a common end date for a sufficient number of courses they will be automatically migrated to Bb7. If there are stragglers than those courses may need to be exported and imported separately into Bb7. The name for the new Bb7 will be a temporary one until all live courses are migrated from Bb6. Then Bb7 will become Learn. Bb6 will be available for a short amount of time (16 weeks) if our licensing permits.

6. Courses created in Blackboard will be unavailable to students and the availability will be left up to the discretion of the college. Does the instructor have the responsibility to make it available or the Bb admin? Is this to be determined on a college by college basis?
Courses will be brought over from Bb6 with their availability the same as in Bb6 after May 10th. As in the past, courses can be batch created when requested by the colleges and their availability will be at the request of the colleges. Courses on Explore should be exported and imported (or archived and restored) into 7.2 production by the college Domain administrator.

7. When will we (Bb Admins) be able to create fall sites for faculty?
On the new system, July 1, 2007.

8. What courses are being copied over from Bb 6 (Organizations, SU07) and how long will we have to clean up and archive courses in Bb 6?
All properly ID'ed Fall '06 and later courses will be automatically moved to Blackboard 7. ITS will provide a list of courses that will be migrated for verification. May 10th is the date the migration process will begin. Changes to courses after that date are not guaranteed to be in the new system and Blackboard administrators should be prepared to export and import (or archive and restore) those courses manually into the production server.

9. What courses are being copied over from Bb 6 (Organizations, SU07) and how long will we have to clean up and archive courses in Bb 6?
All organizations will be imported. Licensing for Bb 6 will determine it be turned off the middle of the fall 2007 semester in October. All courses will have been archived at that time if they meet the correct naming convention. Course IDs must start with the college designator.

10. What is going to happen with the content system? Will faculty still have the same 100 mb of space or more? How will content be transferred over? Will faculty have to reestablish links from the content system in courses that are copied over?
In theory faculty should not have to re-link but this has not been tested. Faculty will still have the same allocated space as they currently have. It will be transferred automatically.

11. Will we have guest access in Bb 7.2?
Guest access will be the same as Bb 6.2. Catalog will be performance tested.

12. When will we have access to Bb 7.2? Will that be upgraded now or after the SP07 term? Will we continue to use explore?
The production server will be available to you on July 1, 2007. You will continue to use Explore for training-we can upgrade to Bb7.2 if there are no spring students with incompletes.

13. Will all SU07 & FA07 courses already in Bb 6 be migrated to Bb7? If so, if there is a change in course ID format, how will they be handled?
The course ID format stays the same. All courses will be migrated on May 10th. After that time fall and spring courses will have to be migrated by the Bb admin manually. Summer 2007 courses will be migrated at the end of the summer semester.

14. Will the Portfolio feature be available in Bb. 7.1?
Portfolio feature will not be available in Bb 7.

WIMBA RELEASED FROM CAPTIVITY!

2007-04-06T14:50:00.000-04:00

From: Inez Farrell [mailto:ifarrell@vccs.edu]

Hello All,

I am pleased to announce that WIMBA is now activated for all faculty use in Bb6. This version does not have the podcasting tools but that portion will be available in Blackboard 7.2, July 1, 2007.

I flipped the switch on in Bb6 so it is now available in every course, but I do think it is critical that faculty are trained in its usage. WIMBA offers a one hour web training several times each week. Their schedule of training events can be located here: http://www.wimba.com/eventreg/participant/registration.php?eventid=842
Thank you all for participating in a successful pilot and subsequent enterprise purchase of a software our faculty enjoy. I would love to find more just like it!

Towards that end I want to show you a new tool (free this time) that GOOGLE has just introduced. David Carter-Tod pointed it out to me and it is slick. Go to http://maps.google.com/ and click on NEW. You will see some very creative ways faculty can use this tool for instruction and even better, students can do group projects and presentations!! Can you see the creative possibilities?

I just love it!

Inez Farrell, Ph.D.
Director of Instructional Technology
Virginia’s Community Colleges
101 North 14th StreetRichmond, VA 23219

It Begins...

2007-04-06T08:44:00.000-04:00

Blackboard Administrators
Key activities for Blackboard 7.2 upgrade

May 10, 2007:
Last date to update courses scheduled for migration from Bb6

Reviewed courses for migration (FA06 and beyond)
Standardized course IDs for courses to be migrated if necessary
Facilitated clean-up of courses scheduled for migration. The less data we migrate, the faster it will be.

Week beginning June 25:

Attend one-day training for Primary Administrators or Attend one-day training for Backup Administrators

Explore-related tasks (no specific date)

Verify archives of Explore courses
Schedule time to restore archived Explore courses to new system
Monitor incomplete students on Explore – after full Go Live (August 15) on new system, these should be finished on new system

June 1: Portal-related tasks

Identify portal modules for migration
Review college tab layout
Review current branding

Before Faculty and Staff Go Live

Review manually created users in Bb6 and identify any needing recreation
Review current VCCS Blackboard documentation
Review Course ID standards
Review privileges associated with different system roles in Explore
Continue familiarizing yourself with new features of 7.1 and 7.2

July 1: Go Live for Faculty and Staff
Post Faculty/Staff Go Live tasks

Verify course integrity
Verify content system items
Verify portal configuration
Add manually-managed users
Request batch creation of Fall courses or manually create Fall courses
Strongly recommended
Continue training faculty on new discussion board

August 15: Go Live for Students
Strongly recommended

Train students on new discussion board

New Software available for all TNCC users: Atomic Learning

2007-04-02T10:58:00.000-04:00

TNCC now has a site license for Atomic Learning. Atomic Learning is available in two locations: http://highed.atomiclearning.com/ and http://atomiclearning.com . The tutorials and login are the same, but the http://atomiclearning.com has additional resources geared toward the K-12 market.

What is Atomic Learning?
Atomic Learning provides web-based software training for more than 100 applications faculty, staff and students use everyday. Our short, easy-to-view-and-understand tutorials are an integral part of a professional development program, a valuable curriculum supplement, and an anytime/anywhere training resource.

Tutoriales, versión en español
¡Bienvenido a nuestra selección de tutoriales en español! Aquí encontrará tutoriales en español para los programas populares con versiones en español.

Alright, I want it… what do I do?

Go to http://highed.atomiclearning.com/

(Contact me for the user name and password. )

How do my students use it?
You distribute the URL, login and password. You can distribute the information in your class, email your students, or post it in your Bb course but you cannot publish the information on a public webpage.

Recently Added tutorials:

New Windows series

Blackboard 7 - Student
Encore DVD 2
Office Suite 2007 - What's New?
Photoshop Elements 5

New Macintosh series

Acrobat Pro 8 - Intro
Blackboard 7 - Student

Instructional Technology Notice: Digital Drop Box Unavailable in Upgrade to Bb 7

2007-03-12T11:46:00.000-04:00

From: Susan S. Wood
Sent: Sunday, March 11, 2007 10:27 PM
To: dlist_vccs_vice_presidents_provosts
Cc: Susan S. Wood
Subject: Instructional Technology Notice: Digital Drop Box Unavailable in Upgrade to Bb 7

To VCCS Vice Presidents and Provosts,
The Digital Drop Box function will be made globally unavailable to colleges in the upgrade to Blackboard 7. VCCS Academic Services and Research concurs with the recommendation made by VCCS Information Technology Services (ITS) to discontinue availability of the Digital Drop Box in the upgrade to Blackboard 7. Problems with the Digital Drop Box have been documented, such as the disappearance of student work, errors in submission dates and times, and the delayed appearance of submitted files. Lack of functionality can impact on critical academic issues including the flow of instruction and the assignment of grades. The ITS technical recommendation and background are included below.

Campus instructional technologists and trainers should instruct their faculty in the use of the recommended replacement tool, the Assignment Manager. Excellent training materials are available on the explore.vccs.edu log-in page.

Please share this notice with deans, faculty, instructional technologists, and others as appropriate at your college. Questions should be directed to Dr. Inez Farrell, Director of Instructional Technology, ifarrell@vccs.edu .

The Digital Drop Box was first introduced as a new feature in Blackboard 5.5 as a tool for students to exchange files with instructors. Soon the colleges who were using it began experiencing and reporting problems with the Digital Drop Box. The problems were serious in nature and threatened the integrity of academic records. Documented incidents include student files disappearing from the Digital Drop Box of instructors, submitted files having incorrect dates and times of submissions, and grade disputes filed because of delayed assignment reception although the student submitted on time.

In 2005, colleges were encouraged to discontinue the use of the Digital Drop Box and to use instead the Assignment Manager. Also in 2005, the Blackboard Administrator Guidelines recommended that the Digital Drop Box be made unavailable. IssueTrak tickets filed in 2006 regarding the Digital Drop Box remain unresolved as solutions were not forthcoming from Blackboard. In November 2006, the Distance and Distributed Learning Committee (DDLC) heard a report from ITS regarding significant challenges with the Digital Drop Box.

Thank you,

Susan

Time to request Summer 2007 Bb course shells

2007-03-11T18:36:00.000-04:00

We are now processing Summer 2007 distributive course shell requests. We are no longer combining classes. You must request one shell per class. If you have questions about this please call (825-2807).

Distance and hybrid course shells have already been created. Please check your Blackboard.

Request form:
NOTE: NEW URL!
http://community.tncc.edu/cgi-bin/rws3.pl?FORM=bb_new_request

Requests will be processed every Friday.

New to Blackboard?
To begin:

You must have TNCC email. If you do not, please contact your division Administrative Assistant.
You must have a Bb login. It is the same login as your SIS login. To look up you SIS/Bb login go to http://tncc.my.vccs.edu .
You must know your course, number and section before you request a Bb course shell.
You must request a blank Bb course shell. Fill out the request form located at: http://community.tncc.edu/cgi-bin/rws3.pl?FORM=bb_new_request
If you need Bb help once you have a Bb course shell contact:
Jan Klingberg
Blackboard Trainer
klingbergj@tncc.edu
825-3880
Our faculty self-help materials are located at:http://www.tncc.edu/blackboard/bb6_faculty.htm
Our help materials for your students are located at: http://www.tncc.edu/blackboard/bb6_student.htm

Jan and I are looking forward to working with you.

New Software for TNCC Faculty& Adjunct Faculty

2007-02-21T18:38:00.000-05:00

TNCC now has a site license for Turnitin. Note: We only purchased the Plagiarism Prevention Package (web based version). We have a one year license. We will be able to obtain a usage report and will be asking for feedback from faculty users prior to the renewal period to determine if we want to continue using this product.

What is Turnitin?
Plagiarism Prevention: Turnitin is recognized worldwide as the standard in Plagiarism Prevention. Turnitin instantly identifies papers containing unoriginal material and acts as a powerful deterrent to stop student plagiarism before it starts.

Alright, I want it… what do I do?

Send an email smithru@tncc.edu
Include in the email your MyTNCC login (the one you use to get access to SIS and Blackboard – not your TNCC email). Do not send your password!
You will be sent directions to the online TNCC Turnitin Workshop (complete the workshop at your own pace).
After successfully completing the workshop you will receive the Account ID and Join Password
Begin using Turnitin
Participate in feedback surveys

Security Status Bar in IE 7

2007-01-31T15:34:00.000-05:00

Security Status Bar in IE 7

Scenario:
I just upgraded to Internet Explorer 7. One of the websites that I must visit (WebMail @TNCC) now displays the message, "There is a problem with this website's security certificate.” I also see a red X in the address bar, indicating a certificate error.

Question:
What is it and what do I do?

What is it?
It is a new feature in IE 7 and is also included in the new Windows Vista operating system. It is there to enhance awareness of website security and privacy settings by displaying color-coded notifications next to the address bar. Internet Explorer 7 changes the Address Bar to green for websites bearing new High Assurance certificates, indicating the site owner has completed extensive identity verification checks. The address bar changes to pink if it can not verify the security of the website.

What do I do?
In the case of the WebMail @TNCC you would click Continue to this Website (not recommended). If you receive these warning messages while browsing to other secure websites (website that begin with https) you have to determine if you can trust the website.

Thomas Nelson Community College is working to obtain and issue the new High Assurance certificates.

New Software available for Checkout (TNCC employees only)

2007-01-24T09:35:00.000-05:00

TNCC now has a site license for OpenMind 2. It can be checked out of the library by any faculty/staff/admin./adjunct faculty. There are only 10 circulating copies you may want to call the library before you go to check it out to be sure a copy is available.

What is OpenMind 2?
Easy to learn and easy to use, OpenMind is a highly effective way of brainstorming ideas visually, structuring them, developing them and increasing the comprehension of complex concepts. Ideal for use by individuals, small teams or large groups, OpenMind generates illustrated Mind Maps® which you can view in different ways (flowchart, outline, timeline and others) and use in presentations, study guides, web sites and more. Integrating seamlessly with Microsoft® Word, Microsoft® PowerPoint, HTML and Mediator, OpenMind is a flexible and versatile concept development tool.

OpenMind is particularly suited for:
Visual outlining of written documents
Storyboarding and creating websites or presentations
Creating timelines

Perfect for:
Brainstorming and visualizing ideas
Organizing and outlining ideas
Storyboarding and creating presentations
Improving memory and concentration
Simplifying decision-making
Critical thinking
Note taking

Export to:
HTML (Includes Wizard)
Mediator (Includes Wizard)
Word / RTF (Includes templates)
PowerPoint (Includes templates)
Timeline (HTML)

Import from:
Microsoft® Word
Microsoft® PowerPoint
Mediator

http://www.matchware.com/en/products/openmind/default.htm

DDLC minutes 11/16/06

2006-11-27T20:10:00.000-05:00

Distance and Distributed Learning ASAC Workgroup
November 16, 2006, 10am – 3pm

Minutes

Meeting called to order at 10:05am

Members present: Rebecca Blankenship (GCC), Susan Beasley (CVCC), Kim Blosser (BRCC), Charles Boling (VHCC), Colleen Kehoe (for John Ambrose - JSRCC), Jeff Burleson (MECC), Joan Trabandt (NVCC), John Zwick (TCC), Kristen Kelly (JTCC), Leslie Smith (RCC), Adam Bryant (for Linda Clausson – NRCC), Carrie (for Coveny – VWCC), Reo McBride (DLCC), Ron Wilt (ESCC), Ruth Smith (TNCC), Stacy Harris (SWCC), Joan Tuck (SVCC), Jamie Shetrone (WCC), Bill Day (DCC), Inez Farrell (AS&R), Matt Lawson (AS&R)

Members absent: Shelia Hobbs (PDCCC), Mark Nelson (PHCC), Lori Ledford (PVCC), George Hoffman (LFCC)

Action Items:

Action Item 1: VDEN document review

ASAC has requested that the DDLC review the documentation and make further recommendations.

Should the VDEN documents be abolished or revised and updated?
What parts of the document should be kept either in policy or revised?
What parts of the document are already included in policy manual?

After much discussion, it was decided that some clear, easy to find guidelines were needed in addition to the hard-to-read official policy manual.

Issues were noted such as the difficulty in meeting the VDEN standards for compressed video and the need for possible additions to the standards such as integration of VITA and accessibility standards. For now, it was agreed that the focus needs to be on revision or deletion of items from the present documentation with recommendation for additional items to follow.

The committee broke into five groups to take a preliminary look at the different sections of the document and recommend changes. The resulting edited document will be compiled and sent back out to the committee for further work and discussion.

Action recommendation: Inez will report to ASAC that work has begun and that a recommendation will be available for their March meeting.

Jamie Shetrone made the motion as stated above and Leslie Smith seconded it. It passed unanimously.

Action Item 2: Integration of PS and Bb

A workgroup was formed at the last DDLC meeting to address the integration of PS and Bb.

This workgroup met twice and the minutes from those meetings were distributed. As a result of the workgroups recommendation to the entire DDLC, the group recommended that ASAC support the integration with the attached guidelines.

Discussion followed on a number of points including how to opt out of the integration and who has access to the flags to flag courses for integration. A major issue was the Blackboard administrator’s access to control the flagging of course in a timely manner. This item was added to the guidelines listed to go forward to ASAC. Inez requested that the wording be simplified.

Matt Lawson stated that the integration would be implemented in the summer along with the version upgrade.

Action Recommended: The DDLC recommends the integration of PS and BB course creation and student enrollment with the attached guidelines.

Motion was made by Leslie Smith and seconded by Reo McBride. The motion was passed.

Discussion Items:

Discussion Item 1: Automation of VCCSOnline

The process of listing online courses in the VCCSOnline system is a manual process. It was discussed that this process is time-consuming. At least one college has developed a process to pull the courses directly from Peoplesoft. It was generally agreed that integration would be beneficial if individual colleges have the ability to remove a course if the college did not want a course listed.

Action Recommended: Action was recommended on this item due to the general agreement by all that it would be of great benefit.

A motion was made that the DDLC recommend that the resources be provide so that the system office staff can create a process to automate pulling online courses into the VCCSOnline system. The motion was passed.

Discussion Item 2: Biweekly audio conferencing

Discussion was held on the possibility of having biweekly audio conferences where college distance learning and instructional technology staff could ask questions and receive updates on the system office’s initiatives. This had occurred in the past with previous AS&R staff. It was stated that the meetings would not involve policy decisions but would just be a chance to ask questions and receive update information on initiatives of individual colleges as well as the system office.

Inez Farrell, AS&R’s Director of Instructional Technology stated that she would be willing to hold informal, monthly audio meetings. The group decided on the second Monday of each month from 2-3 pm with the first session on December 11^th. Further details would follow.

Discussion Item 3: Backpack in Blackboard Version 7 (Leslie)

The need for our students to be able to access materials in Blackboard despite the issue of low bandwidth and large downloads was discussed. The pervasive nature of this issue was highlighted in that we still have many areas where dial-up is the only option or the only affordable option. Technology to assist in providing equal access to all students is a continuing need and one of the Chancellor’s 2009 goals.

The Blackboard Backpack was highlighted as one possible solution to meet these issues and a pilot to test its feasibility was discussed. It was agreed that this item would be reworked by Leslie Smith and a recommendation framed for a pilot. This will be brought back before the DDLC meeting as an action item. (Hand-out attached)

Information Items:

Information Item 1: Update on WIMBA pilot (Inez)

Inez reported a large response on the pilot currently in progress. Arrangements have been made for WIMBA to be turned on for use in the new version of the Blackboard pilot in spring.

Information Item 2: Update on E-Portfolio pilot (Inez)

C.J. Bracken from Germanna Community is working with the college’s Nursing department and the system office on a pilot of the e-Portfolio system for SP06.

Information Item 3: Update on Blackboard upgrade and training (Matt)

Inez Farrell reported on training she is working on providing for Instructional Technologists the week of December 14^th. She stated that the training will be to prepare the Technologists for training the faculty. It is not Administrator training. She is also working to access funds for faculty training at New Horizons. Concern over lack of training for administrators was expressed and it was suggested that any funds be used for her December ‘train the trainer’ sessions with the idea that these persons could provide sessions at New Horizons. Matt Lawson advised that Version 7.1 is available now for exploration on the explore.vccs.edu site and that faculty will be asked to pilot Version 7.1 for the spring semester for full implementation for the summer semester. Questions were raised about how faculty could begin preparing for the pilot as soon as possible.

Information Item 4: Blackboard Digital Dropbox (Matt)

It was reported by Matt Lawson that the Digital Dropbox has become a support nightmare for the system office as well as the colleges. Its poor design has caused numerous issues from the beginning. It was brought to the attention of Blackboard and their response is that the Assignment feature should be used as a replacement and the Digital Dropbox disabled. This is what the system office will do in version 7.

There was discussion that at least one college strongly objects to loosing this feature and want it left available. Matt responded that the Digital Dropbox would no longer be supported.

Information Item 5: Atomic Learning (Leslie)

Leslie Smith brought up the continuing question of supporting tutorials for some of the applications that all of us use and must support. Previous efforts to work together to create tutorials have had mixed results and then there is the problem of the need for continuous updates. It is suggested that we discuss the need for system wide purchase of appropriate tutorials such as what is provided by Atomic Learning. These tutorials could be used to support such systems as Blackboard, MS Office, and others. (Hand-out attached)

DDLC Integration Guidelines

Colleges will have the option to opt in or out for integration.
The courses will be created “unavailable” to students and the availability of the courses will be left up to the discretion of the college.
Integrated courses will be assigned a template (optional) through an additional flag in PeopleSoft and by specifying the template ID
Integration of a course will not prevent Blackboard Administrators from manually adding additional users to that course.
A standard course naming convention will be used that includes: Semester—College—Course ID—Section Number—Course Name.
Students will be disabled as a user in a course when they are backed out of PeopleSoft.
Staff designation for instructor will be used if there is no instructor assigned to a course.
Blackboard administrators will have access to control the flags that set courses for integration.

Proposal for systemwide implementaton of a online tutorial system for software applications

What’s the Need?

Students need assistance with various software packages at all hours of the day or night. One of the Chancellor’s goals for this year in technology is to continue to develop a world-class teaching, learning environment that is sufficiently sustainable and scalable to meet the growing demands of access and operations. To help achieve this goal, an online tutorial program is need system wide.

specific opportunities to be achieved:

Economies of scale.
Access across all colleges for students that take courses at multiple colleges.
Streamlined assistance for students by pointing students to a central repository of helpdesk type tutorials.
Systems office and all colleges can point students to one location instead of 23 different instances of support.
Tier 1 helpdesk support through 24 x 7 online support when and where needed.

HOW TWO SCHOOLS HAVE PROVIDED SUCH SUPPORT:

RCC and GCC are owners of site licenses for Atomic Learning. They choose this product for a number of reasons. Those that might be appropriate for this proposal are listed below:

Provide both audio and video tutorials
Software tutorials are kept up to date
Variety of software that is supported
Flexible in terms of providing special tutorials, if needed, such tutorials for Mirapoint, PeopleSoft, Blackboard content system, etc.
Can connect an objective in Blackboard to a specific tutorial.%
Ease of use and timeframe of each tutorial is from less than a minute to a maximum of 3 minutes.

Spring 2007 Blackboard Course Shell Requests

2006-11-05T09:38:00.000-05:00

We have batched created SP07 Distance and Hybrid courses. Please check Bb to be sure your course was created. I will begin to process Distributive Spring 2007 course shell requests: November 20, 2006

We no longer combining classes. You must request one shell per class. If you have questions about this please call.

Requests will be processed every Friday

Definitions

Distributive (Web Enhanced) Courses use technology in concert with face-to-face classes.

A course that is based exclusively in a brick-and-mortar classroom (face-to-face), and the instructor supplements face-to-face classroom instruction with valuable online resources supported by Blackboard, the supported course management system or the Web, such as grade book, syllabus, assignment submission, etc.
Hybrid (Blended) Courses have a percentage of the content delivered/taught in Blackboard, the supported course management system and a percentage of the content delivered/taught face-to-face.

A course whose web delivered components meets the same Standards of Good Practice used for online courses and significantly impact learning while reducing the amount of classroom time.
Distance (Online) Courses have the content delivered/taught in Blackboard, the supported course management system. Any face-to-face meetings (such as an orientation, exams, or labs) are only held if they appeared in the registration class schedule and notes field of the Student Information System.

A courses that is based in the Blackboard, the course management system, where students access instructions, instructor’s office, all course materials (lectures, assignments, resources, etc.) and communicate via email, discussions, and/or chats with the instructor and other students.

Wimba Voice Tools for Blackboard - Pilot

2006-09-24T20:01:00.000-04:00

Wimaba Voice Tools
Give your online Class a Voice!

To join the pilot and try the Horizon Wimba Building Block for Blackboard:

You will need to register the class that is going to use Wimba with me (that means just give me the course ID). I must send that information to Inez Ferrell,the Director of Instructional Technology, in Richmond.
The instructor will have to give me (to send to Inez) a detailed description of its use within the class instruction (what objectives it will support) the number of students who are in the class and may make use of it
Then an evaluation at the end of the course that illustrates its effectiveness from both the instructor and student point of view.

This may seem like a lot of documentation but it really is not if the students are asked to evaluate Wimba in a discussion board and the instructor can pull the information from both what the purpose of its use was with the objective and the result.

Of course all of this is to help us make a business case for purchasing Wimba on an Enterprise level.

Please call me if you want to join the pilot or have questions.

What is Wimba?
http://www.horizonwimba.com/products/voicetools/

Benefits

Offer live discussions between students and teachers, anytime, anywhere
Teach foreign languages by emphasizing speaking and listening
Encourage on-going discussions and debates about different subjects and ideas
Easily teach pronunciation, rhythm, stress, and emphasis
Students learn all aspects of a language through listening, speaking, and writing exercises
24/7 access
Seamlessly integrate within Blackboard and WebCT - no new interfaces to configure or commands to learn
Instant anytime, anywhere access to language resources as students are no longer constrained by the availability of a physical language lab and/or instructors

Features

Live Conversation and/or Voice Coaching
Practice a language by actually speaking it with someone. This real-time voice conferencing feature allows for live oral language instruction, small group role-plays, and other live, conversation-based tasks. Additionally, instructors can conduct lectures, conferences, discussions and debates, keep virtual office hours for conversations with students, and even record discussions for future playback.
Threaded Voice Boards
Speak and read a language at the same time, or simply create threaded voice discussions about any subject. Great for brainstorming and collaborating on almost any topic in any language, instructors and students can post vocal messages with accompanying text into our voice-based message boards. Discuss multiple subjects at once by dividing new topics into their own threads. This is one of the best ways to practice all aspects of a new language.
Embedded Voice within Course Pages
Easily add listening exercises and voice messages into any CMS course page. Our Voice Tools incorporate a small recorder and playback feature that can be placed within any CMS page allowing instructors to verbally explain complex ideas, post assignments, or simply highlight important ideas that will be discussed in upcoming lessons.
Voice-Enabled E-Mail
Students and instructors can send vocal email messages to anyone, and recipients simply reply by sending their own voice email. Voice emails are particularly useful for role-playing activities and question and answer sessions. And to ensure security, instructors have full control of the distribution of every email.
Integrate into your Course Management System
Our voice tools integrate with course management systems so they have the same look and feel as other tools, significantly reducing barriers of adoption and minimizing learning curves. Our vocal tools appear within your CMS like any other resource; if you know how to use your CMS, you already know how to use Voice Tools.
Oral Assessments
Assess your students 24/7. Enable language instructors to build a wide range of test questions types, such as multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, pairing, voice dialogue, vocal multiple-choice, or vocal pairing multiple-choice. These questions can be associated with a variety of oral, visual, and text-based prompts, requiring oral and text-based responses. Learners simply log into the system and proceed through the test questions, recording their responses as they use Voice Tools.

Minutes- DDLC September 14, 2006

2006-09-19T14:23:00.000-04:00

Distance and Distributive Learning Committee Meeting
September 14, 2006

Meeting called to order at 10:00 A.M.

Members Present: Inez Farrell (AS&R), Jeff Burleson (MEC), Charles Boling (VH), Jaime Sheltrone (WCC), Kristen Kelly(JT), George Hoffman (LF), Joan Trabandt (NOVA), Lori Ledford (PVCC), Linda Claussen (NRCC), Reo McBride (DSL), Ruth Smith (TNCC), Kim Blosser (BRCC), Leslie Smith (RCC), Rebecca Blankenship (GCC), Ralph Lucia (ITS) , Matt Lawson (AS&R), John Zwick (TCC), Bill Hightower (AS&R), Joan Tuck (SSVCC), Susan Wood (AS&R), Colleen Kehoe (JSR), Monty Sullivan (AS&R), Susan Beasley (CVCC).

Members Absent: William Dey (DCC), Dick Wilt (ESCC), Shelia Hobbs (PDCCC), Mark Nelson (PHCC), Stacy Harris (SWCC), Ramona Coveny (VWCC).

Opening Remarks: Dr. Monty Sullivan

Distance and Distributive Learning Committee (DDLC) has been reconstituted as an advisory workgroup to the Academic and Student Affairs Council (ASAC) subcommittee on Educational Technology (ET)
The committee will make recommendations on policy level decisions to ASAC’s ET. Inez Farrell will be the voice of DDLC to ASAC’s ET.
The committee is now comprised of nuts and bolts personnel including faculty, and structured to improve communication and electronic services to students,
The Educational Technology group has been reconstituted to bring in Vice Presidents who have experience in technology realm; ASAC is to act on issues of concern.
Impact of this committee affects how we function on a campus level and communicate on a system level

Agenda:

Action Item 1: Election of New Chair: Rebecca Blankenship was nominated by Reo McBride and elected by unanimous vote.

Action Item 2: Recommendation of Archiving Courses In Blackboard

Discussion

ITS initially proposed current semester and two subsequent semesters.
It was proposed to ITS that faculty would not want archiving to take place until early in 4th semester. ITS explained this would be a hardship on the system as the number of courses makes backups take longer, increases the size of the databases and slows performance. Ralph would like a calendar of semester start and end times so scheduling of events such as this could be facilitated. It was asked that a schedule of dates when courses would be removed from production be published. The calendar would be well in advance and notification sent to Blackboard Administrators.

Various suggested processes were discussed to assist individual instructors who want courses to stay on the system for more than three semesters.

*Recommendation for archiving of courses in Blackboard: It is propose to the Educational Technology Committee of ASAC that courses created in Blackboard for specific semester will be retained for three semesters beyond the semester offered and then be removed from the Blackboard server. Additionally, Blackboard administrators will be responsible for polling faculty each semester and deleting unused courses according to local college guidelines.

Action Item 3: Outdated VDEN procedures that exist outside of VCCS policy
manual

*Action Recommended: Recommendation to Educational Technology Committee of ASAC for review of existing VDEN document and eliminate outdated VDEN procedures. Additionally, incorporate revised procedures into VCCS policy manual and eliminate the VDEN document entirely.

(The goal is to pull out what is relevant, reword it appropriately and put the results into the VCCS policy manual, and in the process eliminating the VDEN document.)

Discussion Item 1: Deletion of course records in Bb archived courses

Course syllabi retained until superseded or obsolete and then destroyed
Academic Records – including roster, grades, postings, student information
When are archives deleted – 2 years total at system level (1 year production, 1 year archive)
What policy for colleges to delete Bb archives?
Will individual college policy supersede Library of Virginia recommendations of three years?
Need to find out what home college does in People Soft – gather information

Homework: DDLC members will find out what their home college does for records retention in People Soft and the effect if any on the records kept in Blackboard. Many committee members did not know of this requirement and do not think it is followed on their campuses.

*Discussion Recommendation: Recommend ASAC discuss policy for retention or deletion of Blackboard archives in compliance with Library of Virginia policy GS111.

Discussion Item 2: Integration with People Soft

*Recommendation: Recommend pursuing the integration of People Soft with Blackboard. DDLC workgroup was formed to further discuss the issues and to write a proposal for ASAC ET that will include a rationale, benefits to the colleges, and strategies that may need to be addressed to successfully implement integration.

Work group: Reo, Jaime, Colleen, Ruth, Kim, Kristen, Leslie, Jeff, and Rebecca. This group will be further divided when the issues are determined.

Information Items:
Merger of EMPLIDs to end: Difficult to tie back to individual SIS records at multiple institutions, email problems. ITS can identify who has multiple IDs. Colleges can accept other colleges EMPLID in order to simplify student process. A and R needs to be aware of situation, can merge accounts by agreement. Help Desk also.
Migration to Blackboard 7.1: 6.3 is available, but will not go to it, but to 7.1. Possible migration summer 2007. 7.1 will be put into BBTrain demo environment so people can experience. Timeframe is not yet concrete. Pilot in spring 2007.
Wimba: NOVA and Piedmont currently use. Willing to allow any colleges to test/pilot for free with two stipulations: feedback is provided and online training is required. May be shared cost (template pricing for system/FTE based). Matt will look at Pronto.
Student Email Licenses: Retention of email accounts (current semester minus two plus next semester, change in registration caused current semester minus two plus two) Oversubscribed by over 30,000. Much discussion ensued about the summer semester and add/drop dates. Recommend current semester minus one and up to the second eight week add/drop date. Propose semester plus one with incompletes adding another semester so that any students who did not enroll in a summer course would not lose their college email address at the beginning of the Fall semester.
Definition of hybrid and blended courses: Definition part of Course Coding Document submitted to ASAC.
Meeting Dates:
a) November 16, Thursday, 10 – 3 pm, Central Virginia, Lynchburg
b) February 15, Thursday, via Breeze or compressed video
c) May 24, Thursday, Featherstone
7. Secure Socket Layers – still some technical problems. Work around is putting certificate on feeding site.

Meeting adjourned at 3:00 P.M.

IE6, Bb and Tests

2006-04-17T12:16:00.000-04:00

Posted on Monday, April 17, 2006 - 8:08 am:

Another follow-up on this issue. Another college on the ASU list reported at the weekend that a quiz with 25 short answer questions crashed IE if it had this update. This is because there are 25 WYSIWYG editors if the questions are presented all at once, and IE can't cope.

If you run into this problem I would suggest altering the quiz to a one at a time format.

David

David Carter-Tod
ITS - Client Services
Virginia Community College System
dcartertod@vccs.edu

Handout (.pdf) on IE6 issues with Bb

2006-04-17T12:13:00.000-04:00

Posted on Friday, April 14, 2006 - 10:26 am:

Towson State has created a very nice two page handout on this issue with regard to Blackboard. The document is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License (http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/), so can be shared.

http://wwwnew.towson.edu/facultyonline/Documents/ActiveXControls.pdf

David

David Carter-Tod
ITS - Client Services
Virginia Community College System
dcartertod@vccs.edu

Microsoft update to IE6 and impact on Blackboard

2006-04-17T12:03:00.000-04:00

Microsoft released an update to IE6 on Tuesday, Feb 28

This update will change the way IE handles some active content.
You can read info from MS at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912945 which describes some issues MS is working on.
The "mandatory" download went out on April 11.

The following is from Craig Chanoff, Vice President, Support Blackboard Inc.:

Blackboard just sent the following notice regarding this IE Update - the most wide-ranging impact appears to be on the WYSIWYG editor:

quote:
On April 11, Microsoft is releasing a critical update in response to patent litigation between Microsoft and Eolas (http://msdn.microsoft.com/ieupdate). The update also includes critical security fixes for Internet Explorer. Most users will receive this update automatically via Windows Update. After the update, users will be required to activate applets, ActiveX controls and other embedded objects and plug-ins before they can interact with them. Activation requires hitting the space bar, pressing the enter key, or using the mouse to click on the item. Users running the Firefox or Safari web browsers will not be affected by this update.

General issues affecting all products

Embedded content (including video, audio, Flash) cannot be controlled until activated. Each item is framed with a window that prompts the user to "Press SPACEBAR or ENTER to activate and use this control." After users follow the instructions or click using their mouse; users can use the controls to start, stop or replay embedded content.

An item that contains an equation, or was created from the Equation Editor, will launch a text window that prompts the user to "Press SPACEBAR or ENTER to activate and use this control." The equation will still render on the page.

In general, our testing has uncovered increased instability with the IE browser after this update has been applied. We are escalating this issue with Microsoft.

Blackboard Academic Suite™ & Blackboard Community System™ (Versions 6 and 7, including Application Packs)

- Each Visual Text Box Editor (commonly known as "WYSIWIG editor") will require activation prior to entering text.
- The Virtual Classroom and Lightweight Chat applets will require activation after a student or instructor joins a chat.
- The Blackboard Content Player (SCORM) feature fails to function after installation of the Microsoft update.

MinutesDDLC Meeting — March 31, 2006

2006-04-07T11:35:00.000-04:00

DDLC Meeting — March 31, 2006 PVCC 10:00 a.m.

DRAFT

1. Welcome and Introductions.

The meeting started at 10:11 a.m., John Downey presiding.

Attendees:

John Downey, Laurie Hillstock, Kristen Kelly, Charles Boling, Bob Vawter, susan Kennedy, Kristy Walker, Mike Turner, Linda Capone Claussen, Steve Sachs, Scott Langhorst, Sue Ann Curran, Ralph Lucia, Rebecca Blankenship, Bill Hightower, Sheila Hobbs, Jamie Shetrone, Susan Beasley, Rio McBride, Inez Farrell, Mary Clare DiGiacomo, Ruth Smith, and Rebecca Kittleberger.

2. Update on ASAC actions concerning DDLC Reorganization.
Scott Langhorst read both of the ASAC resolutions to DDLC members which outlined the renaming of the ASAC DDLC to ASAC Educational Technology Committee and which clarified the role of the VCCS DDLC relative to the ASAC Educational Technology Committee.
Some DDLC members expressed concern about the proposed membership of the DDLC as worded. The wording left the appointment of DDLC members up to each College president, which is the current appointment structure a well. However, John and Scott pointed out that the CFAC representative to ASAC requested that faculty members also be appointed to the DDLC and noted that Vice Presidents were supportive of that request. Some members were concerned that some presidents might appoint a faculty member to the committee instead of an instructional technology person, who might have a broader knowledge of influencing academic technology issues. DDLC members discussed various options, including expanding the committee to include faculty representatives rather than replacing slots currently occupied by instructional technology personnel. John Downey indicated that he and Steve Sachs (the governance commission chair) would discuss DDLC committee membership with Dr. Sullivan.
Scott Langhorst read and explained the ASAC discussion item on reviewing the “VDEN Academic Standards” as it relates to proctored activities. Scott and Steve Sachs provided a history of the document and indicated that it was approved through the ASAC and ACOP back when distance learning consisted primarily of asynchronous compressed video courses. Scott mentioned that ASAC viewed the issues regarding proctoring to be broader than distance learning alone and requested a joint committee meeting at the next ASAC between the educational concerns and Educational Technology Committees. In the meantime, Scott emphasized that vice presidents were asked to survey faculty to determine the extent that proctored activities are currently happening at each college. He recommended that DDLC members should work with their VPs to ensure faculty are surveyed.
Steve Sachs talked about House Bill HR609 that just passed as part of the federal higher education reauthorization act. The bill requires colleges to verify the identity of each individual registered to take distance learning courses.

3. Update on Enterprise Initiatives.
Sue Ann Curran described current VCCS IT enterprise initiatives. Ralph Lucia then handed out a document updating the committee on ITS’ current and planned tasks that relate to Blackboard. He requested input from the committee on how to prioritize the list of tasks. Ralph Lucia also stated that ITS was still working on the Blackboard 6.3 test environment. Once that testing environment is ready, the Blackboard 6.3 upgrade can be tested to identify any issues that the upgrade may cause in production. In the meantime, Ralph wanted DDLC to provide feedback regarding the priorities of bringing the various building blocks identified at the last DDLC into production.
Ralph explained the two types of Building Blocks: Freeware & Open Source. Freeware comes “as is” at no cost. Since the source code is typically not provided with freeware, those building blocks cannot be altered if they cause any issues in production. Open Source software typically comes with the source code and thus can often be programmed differently if issues arise. Ralph also mentioned that although all of the building blocks requested at the last DDLC meeting come without a cost, ITS staff time devoted to testing and implementing such software should not be overlooked.
John Downey recommended, and the committee agreed, to start with the MERLOT Building Block as a test, since that was the only Open Source software provided by Blackboard that includes support. Once that building block is implemented and tested in the test database, then it could be launched in the production environment. Once that action is taken and the impact on end users is assessed, other building blocks could be tested using the same methodology. John suggested that the DDLC organize itself at the next meeting to develop a procedure for prioritizing additional Building Blocks for ITS. The document provided by Ralph is appended to these minutes.

Break for lunch.

Note: John Downey had to return to BRCC for faculty interviews. He asked Mary Clare DiGiacomo to fill in as chair for the afternoon.

4. Update/discussion on Course Coding for Distance Learning.
Rebecca Kittleberger handed out the “Course Coding in PeopleSoft” 3/30/06 draft and reported that the A&R Peoplesoft workgroup recommended that the document be approved by DDLC and subsequently by ASAC. Some DDLC members suggested that no one in the A&R workgroup has sufficient expertise in distance learning to understand the coding issues involved. DDLC made several suggestions for Rebecca to take back to the A&R workgroup. The major suggestions made by the DDLC included:
-Replace the term “Blended Courses” with “Hybrid/Blended Courses” so that the colleges that have used the term “Hybrid Courses” in publications can still use it.
-The committee suggested developing a category for real-time (synchronous) distance courses, such as those taught using Centra. The term “Virtual-RT” (real time) was suggested.
-DDLC Members discussed whether the term “Compressed Video” be changed to “Interactive Television”?
-If the LMS Panel is going to be used in the future for identifying courses, then should we be telling colleges that they do not have to use it now?

DDLC members discussed the possibility of a joint meeting between DDLC representatives and the A&R Peoplesoft workgroup in order to finalize the document for presentation at ASAC.

5. Blackboard Template Courses: Copy policy recommendation.
Steve Sachs recommended that the VCCS establish a policy in regards to coping courses designed as templates that do not follow the normal naming convention because they are templates and not courses offered in a given semester. Ralph Lucia explained that if a college gives VCCS ITS a course template, and indicates to them the number of courses that the college wants created based on the template, ITS can accommodate that request.

6. Update on the status of the VCCS DL Survey Committee.
Robert Vawter handed out and discussed the March 10, 2006, minutes of the DL Survey meeting.

7. “Refine toolsets in the shared course-management system.”
Robert Vawter asked the committee members to provide responses to Goal #18C, “Refine toolsets in the shared course-management system,” from the 2005-06 Chancellor’s Goals.
He indicated that members would be surveyed on this question after the New Horizons Conference. DDLC members asked for clarification regarding the meaning of “refine toolsets.” The committee was told that upgrading to Blackboard version 6.3 is one example and adding the MERLOT Building Block would be another. Bob also provided members with a list of tools that the VCCS MERLOT Team had identified in the MERLOT collection. The list is available at http://merlot.vccs.edu by clicking on “DL Tools,” which is located under the heading of “Dateline 2009 & MERLOT.”

8. Software titles purchased by the colleges to be run on their computers.
Robert Vawter told the committee that there are many software titles being purchased by multiple colleges without the benefit of pooling their purchases. The committee was told that AS&R is looking into the possibility of putting together a “software menu” of titles owned or being considered by several of our colleges. This menu would contain negotiated software prices that any college could purchase at substantial saving. This does not mean that the software would be enterprise versions but rather that contracts could be negotiated by the system for colleges to opt in or out of. The committee was asked if their colleges would be interested in this possibility, and many stated that they thought it was a good idea.

9. From the floor.
A committee member asked if there was a formal peer review form for distance learning courses. The committee was shown the “Quality Assurance for Asynchronous Distance Learning in the VCCS” plan that was drafted in 2000. This plan is located on the ITDE web site (http://itde.vccs.edu) under the “For College” menu. Some members of the committee also asked if faculty should be required to receive training on how to teach a distance learning course. Some colleges have an On-line Academy for Distance Learning instructors and PVCC has an online certification program for its DL faculty.

10. Next meeting.
The next DDLC meeting is scheduled for Friday, June 2, 2006. The meeting location will be announced as the date approaches. Mary Clare reminded the group that elections for chairperson would occur at that meeting.

Blackboard & Merlot

2006-04-03T19:17:00.000-04:00

From: Ralph Lucia [mailto:rlucia@vccs.edu]
Sent: Mon 4/3/2006 4:23 PM
To: John DowneyCc: Neil Matkin; Monty Sullivan; learn@vccs.edu
Subject: Blackboard & Merlot

John,

At the DDLC meeting on Friday, it was my understanding that the group recommended that the Merlot Building Block should be given a high priority. Many Building Blocks (both free and third party commercial varieties) have been suggested for implementation, but a procedure has not yet been established for the DDLC to recommend Blackboard Building Blocks for the VCCS shared Blackboard system. Again, it is my understanding that the deployment of the Merlot Building Block will serve as a starting point, and the DDLC will work to establish criteria and procedures for recommending other Building Blocks for system-wide deployment in the future. I am happy to report that the Merlot Building Block has now been deployed in the training instance of Blackboard. Blackboard Administrators are able to provide access to this instance for those who require it.

http://bbtrain.vccs.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp

ITS requests that colleges assist in the testing of this Building Block. Upon completion of testing, ITS will deploy it as soon as feasible. We do, however, reserve the right to temporarily disable any Building Block as a troubleshooting measure should we experience problems in our production system. As I mentioned in the meeting, our sources at Blackboard inform us that Building Blocks are known to occasionally cause problems with Blackboard.

ITS staff requests that the DDLC also examine the features that will be available with the implementation of Version 6.3 and provide recommendations regarding which (if any) optional features should be made available immediately at the upgrade. Please see the attached for a list of 6.3 features. The training system mentioned above has been upgraded to Version 6.3 for colleges to preview these new features.

Ralph

Student AND Faculty Blackboard Email Problems

2006-04-03T19:12:00.000-04:00

Posted by Carol Childress, VCCS Client Services, on Monday, April 03, 2006 - 11:57 am:

The following service interruption notice has just been posted:

Subject:
Missing Emails sent from Blackboard System

Details:
Due to problems last week with our move of Blackboard onto a new load balancing system, the Blackboard send mail function encountered problems trying to send emails from within the Blackboard system to email systems supporting students and faculty. Some emails may have been lost. Impact: Faculty and students who sent emails via Blackboard from last Thursday (Mar. 30) through 10:00 AM this morning (Apr. 3) should assume they did not arrive, and should resend the items.

Estimated Resolution Time:
N/A

Contact Information:
VCCS Client Services cssupport@vccs.edu

MERLOT Teaching with Technology Webcast

2006-03-28T15:10:00.000-05:00

On Thursday, March 30 at 1 pm EST free webcast, “MERLOT Teaching with Technology Webcast,” sponsored by MERLOT and the TLT Group, will explore how MERLOT’s online learning objects and other resources can assist faculty in teaching with technology. Members of the MERLOT Teaching and Technology discipline board will facilitate this interactive presentation, which will feature UNC faculty actively using MERLOT. The TLT Group, led by Steve Gilbert and Steve Ehrmann, works with institutions around the world to improve teaching and learning by making more appropriate and cost-effective use of information technology. The program will be led by Ray Purdom, UNC Greensboro, and John Prusch, SUNY Learning Network, and will feature Cathy Swift, Editor of Business Editorial Board, and Laura Franklin, Editor of World Languages Editorial Board who will showcase award winning materials from their disciplines. To register for this workshop, please visit:

http://www.tltgroup.org/Registration/Registration/CEMarch2006.htm

Bob

Robert VawterDirector,
E-learning Delivery System Administrator
Virginia Community College System
804.819.4692 Fax: 804.819.4770
rvawter@vccs.edu

Summer 2006 Bb Requests

2006-03-13T11:28:00.000-05:00

Request form: http://tncc.edu/faculty/smith/bb.htm

We are now processing Summer06 *distributive course requests only. We are no longer combining classes. You must request one shell per class. If you have questions about this please call (825-2807).

Distance and hybrid course shells will automatically be created from data in SIS. You will be notified by email when this process is completed.

Requests will be processed every Friday.

*Types of courses:

Distance learning courses offer students the flexibility of completing some or all of their coursework and assignments without having to come on campus.
Hybrid courses, at TNCC, are defined as courses that meet for at least half the course time in face-to-face (f2f) mode and the remainder of the time online.
Distributive (Web enhanced) courses use technology in concert with face-to-face classes.

New Online Student Orientation

2006-03-07T14:46:00.000-05:00

The new online student orientation is now available. There is no on-campus orientation scheduled for Spring 8W2. Please direct your DL students to the following URL:

http://www.tncc.edu/blackboard/orientation.htm

Spring 2006 Distance and Distributive Learning Blackboard Report

2006-01-27T07:26:00.000-05:00

If you still need a distance, hybrid, or distributive course shell or an organization you must call Ruth Smith (825-2807) before requesting a course shell. Shells will be processed every Friday.
Request a New Course Shell

TNCC's Definitions

Distance learning courses offer students the flexibility of completing some or all of their coursework and assignments without having to come on campus.
Hybrid courses, at TNCC, are defined as courses that meet for at least half the course time in face-to-face (f2f) mode and the remainder of the time online.
Distributive (Web enhanced) courses use technology in concert with face-to-face classes.

• 478 Blackboard Course Shells created
• 29 No loads (contract class, cancelled classes, organizations, etc.)
• 449 Blackboard Shells loaded with students
• 9253 students loaded

BPS
• 33 Distance
• 92 Distributive
• 20 Hybrid
• 1 Other
• 146 Courses

CH
• 10 Distance
• 89 Distributive
• 1 Organization
• 100 Courses

MET
• 20 Distance
• 80 Distributive
• 1 Organization
• 1 Other
• 102 Courses

NHSS
• 14 Distance
• 103 Distributive
• 2 Organizations
• 119 Courses

SS
• 10 Distributive
• 1 Other
• 11 Courses

Blackboard Storage Capacity Upgrade Notification

2005-12-21T17:59:00.000-05:00

From: Neil Matkin
Sent: Wednesday, December 21, 2005 4:51 PM
To: dlist_VCCS_presidents; dlist_vice_presidents_academic; dlist_vccs_technology_council
Cc: dlist_vccs_presidents_secretaries; DList_System_Office_Cabinet
Subject: Blackboard Storage Capacity Upgrade Notification

Friends,

Please forgive yet another message related to things Blackboard but I unintentionally left out some critical information in my last communication. As you know, our Blackboard system is the second largest system we use in the VCCS today but you may not realize that it is the most used around the clock. Students and faculty are on the Blackboard system all over the state literally 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We've made substantial upgrades in the last year in the hardware (primarily processing power) that runs Blackboard as well as upgrading to Blackboard version 6. Shortly after the new year begins you will receive a great deal of information on upgrades to the Network Virginia connections to all campuses which we believe will have substantial positive impact on all of our systems, including Blackboard.

What could we have possibly left out? The answer is storage capacity. As Blackboard utilization has grown exponentially over the last six months, it has become necessary to upgrade storage for the system. We have been patiently waiting for all of the pieces to arrive and the good news is that they are here. The bad news? Blackboard has to be turned off for 24-36 hours to upgrade the storage. From a utilization standpoint -- picking the time when we would interrupt the fewest users -- the absolute best time to do this happens to be on Tuesday, December 27th, shortly after St. Nick arrives back at the Pole (or at Lord Fairfax, whichever comes first).

What are the benefits? They are many:

1) Dramatic increase in available storage space for Blackboard courses,
2) Improvement in the performance and reliability of the Blackboard system,
3) Decrease the amount of time it takes to back up the Blackboard system, and
4) Decrease the amount of time to restore Blackboard in case of a system failure.

After the space is added, the Blackboard system will have over two terabytes of space allocated. That's tech speak for "considerably more than a whole lot". There are super computers without that much storage! We are excited about this as it will allow for more growth in our recently deployed Blackboard Content System. Also, some of this new space will be earmarked for the ability to provide individual, course-level archives for all courses on the system.

The work will begin Monday, December 26 at 8:00 PM and will continue through at least Tuesday, December 27 at 8:00 PM. The number one group impacted during that period in NVCC's ELI courses and we have already worked with our partners there to accommodate the schedule. Our goal is to have the Blackboard system back online within 24 hours of taking it down, 36 hours worst case. I apologize for the inconvenience this presents to students and faculty using Blackboard over the holiday break. I am confident that the long term benefits of this upgrade will reward their patience. I have asked staff to echo this message to all Blackboard accounts effective immediately and information will be provided online to anyone attempting to get into Blackboard during the time when it is being upgraded.

Thanks for your support and for working together to make VCCS systems absolutely world class. Students first, no excuses!

Best for the holidays,

Neil

H. Neil Matkin
Vice Chancellor, Information Technology Services
Virginia Community College System

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Blackboard Degradation in Performance

2005-12-20T12:07:00.000-05:00

Friends,

As announced previously, our Blackboard environment continues to experience a degradation in performance that is directly related to the size of some tables in the database that contains statistical information. We have received considerable feedback about the importance of this data to faculty and college administration, and have therefore postponed the trimming of these tables. Although we would have preferred to wait until after to the holiday break to reduce the data in these tables, the Blackboard system is now experiencing degradation once again and it is my opinion that any further postponement represents an unacceptable risk, especially for the Eli classes at Northern Virginia Community College (since they will be using Blackboard during the break).

Later today, the Blackboard staff will coordinate with the database administrators to begin trimming these tables by removing all data in them prior to September 1, 2005. This action will reduce the size of the problem tables by about 32 million lines. This should be enough to get us safely through the break after which time we will initiate conversations with Blackboard to seek a permanent fix to this issue or develop a work around so valuable data is available as needed. It is important to note, that none of this data will be lost, but archived in another location. After the break, we will work on how to make the archived tables accessible to the colleges and trim the production tables back further as necessary ongoing performance and stability (keeping only the most recent 4 weeks).

It is extremely unfortunate that in the short term we are forced to choose between system stability and easy access to statistical information and, as I stated, we will take up this issue with Blackboard after the holidays. Long-term, we will provide some additional options to provide for both. In the meantime, I sincerely appreciate your patience and cooperation.

Best regards and happy holidays to all,

H. Neil Matkin
Vice Chancellor, Information Technology Services
Virginia Community College System
nmatkin@vccs.edu

Blackboard 5 Availability

2005-12-19T15:52:00.000-05:00

Posted on Monday, December 19, 2005 - 12:58 pm:

Friends,

Just a quick note to remind everyone that BlackBoard version 5.5 (the old version) must be taken out of service at the end of this calendar year. We have been on the new system for about six months and BlackBoard very generously extended our 5.5 license (without additional cost) to allow faculty time to transition courses and resources to the new version. I realize several notes have gone out and I believe our community to be well informed on this but wanted to send one last note as a reminder.

I am excited for the new year, for renewed partnerships with everyone to move our shared agenda in the new year, and for continued and growing successes.

Happy holidays and New Year to all,

Neil

H. Neil Matkin
Vice Chancellor, Information Technology Services
Virginia Community College System
101 N. 14th Street Richmond, VA 23219

Blackboard Stats as of 12/14/05

2005-12-14T13:50:00.000-05:00

Total number of students loaded into Bb 5312.

NHS
77 courses
11 Distance Learning
46 Distributive
MET
61 courses
15 Distance Learning
46 Distributive

BPS
112 courses
31 Distance Learning
17 Hybrid
64 Distributive

CH
70 courses
7 Distance Learning
63 Distributive

SS
8 courses
8 Distributive

VCCS MERLOT Team & Hurricane Katrina

2005-12-03T11:56:00.000-05:00

From: Bob Vawter [mailto:rvawter@vccs.edu]
Sent: Sat 12/3/2005 10:46 AM

The VCCS MERLOT team is playing a major role in directly helping students affected by Hurricane Katrina. The article below is from the December 2005, MERLOT Newsletter. The complete newsletter is attached.

Without a Home, How do we educate? MERLOT, Katrina and the Delgado Community College

Delgado Community College, an institution of the Louisiana Board of Regents with campuses in New Orleans and Covington, Louisiana, was one of the colleges that was impacted by Hurricane Katrina. The academic year had only just begun when the storm hit, closing the college and leaving faculty and students displaced and scrambling for shelter in other parts of the region. In an effort to salvage the instructional year for its academic community, Delgado administrators started looking for solutions. One such answer began with a phone call from Cindy Siegrist, Delgado CC Office from the Office of Faculty Development to Michael Waguespack, a former Delgado faculty member, now teaching at Northern Virginia Community College of the Virginia Community College System. Siegrist and Waguespack brainstormed about how Delgado could quickly bring more courses online to resume instruction for its students. The obvious need was to find quality online materials that had been classroom-tested and that were ready to go. Waguespack immediately thought of MERLOT as a solution for Delgado’s course content needs. He contacted NVCC colleague, Laura Franklin, Co-Editor of the World Languages collection of MERLOT, Laura in turn contacted MERLOT administration for help and received immediate support for collaboration with Delgado. A project was born.

The Editorial Boards of MERLOT in various disciplines have mobilized to create annotated Personal Collections within MERLOT, matching content to the syllabi of Delgado instructors. These personal collections contain materials that will help Delgado CC instructors move forward in their instruction without ‘reinventing the wheel.’ Two collections in English as a Second Language have been started and can be seen at:

http://www.merlot.org/artifact/CollectionDetail.po?collectionOId=1010000000000274224&oid=3000000000000455964

and

http://www.merlot.org/artifact/CollectionDetail.po?collectionOId=1010000000000274211&oid=3000000000000455964

MERLOT administration received requests from other Delgado faculty and other Editorial Boards have begun answering the call. The early success of this project can be attributed to the productive interaction of two MERLOT partners. Both the VCCS and the Louisiana Board of Regents share a longstanding commitment to the development of the MERLOT collection. The faculty members from these institutions have collaborated as Editors and Peer Reviewers for years. MERLOT has afforded these systems the opportunity to become a community in the most human sense of the word, which in turn makes collaboration that much more meaningful for all the partners of MERLOT.

It was also due to MERLOT’s maturity as a collection that it was possible to build such a solution in short order. The collections started in this Delgado project, due to their public availability, will be of equal value to users of MERLOT throughout the Gulf region and those in the rest of the world. Faculty members who create collections will enrich their own courses and make MERLOT a richer resource for everyone. Through this collaborative effort, MERLOT members and others have discovered a valuable resource in our Personal Collections which enable instructors to have immediate access to learning materials used by others. For more information contact webmaster@merlot.org.

Information about MERLOT course content that is available to all VCCS faculty to use in their courses is located at
http://itde.vccs.edu/MERLOT

The VCCS MERLOT Team

Bruce Brown from NRCC serves on MERLOT's Business Editorial Board
Deborah Clarkson from VHCC serves on MERLOT's Health Sciences Editorial Board
Laura Franklin from NVCC serves as Co-Editor of MERLOT's World Languages Editorial Board
Margarita Hodge from NVCC serves on MERLOT's World Languages Editorial Board
Corinne Hoisington from CVCC serves on MERLOT's Information Technology Editorial Board
Idana Hamilton from SwVCC serves on MERLOT's Teaching & Technology Editorial Board
William Paquette from TCC serves as Co-Editor of MERLOT's History Editorial Board
Rassa Rassai from NVCC serves on MERLOT's Engineering Editorial Board
Reva Savkar from NVCC serves on MERLOT's Chemistry Editorial Board
Patricia Taylor from TNCC serves on MERLOT's Mathematics Editorial Board
Marty Zahn from TNCC serves on MERLOT's Biology Editorial Board
Bob Vawter from the System Office is the MERLOT Project Director for the VCCS

The VCCS MERLOT Team is looking for additional VCCS faculty and librarians to be a part of MERLOT. Anyone interested should contact Bob Vawter.

Robert Vawter
Director, E-learning Delivery System Administrator
Virginia Community College System
804.819.4692 Fax: 804.819.4770
rvawter@vccs.edu

Blackboard Content System

2005-11-18T16:00:00.000-05:00

Posted on Friday, November 18, 2005 - 3:38 pm:

The Blackboard Content System gives faculty members a central location to manage their online course content and the ability to share content with other instructors. The Content System also creates a virtual space for librarians to manage eReserves for courses.

Over 80 faculty members, librarians, and administrators participated in a six week pilot of the Blackboard Content System. The pilot began in early September and ended the week of November 7th with a wrap-up online meeting on November 9. We would like to thank the participants for their contributions and insights during the pilot.

Content Sharing

Participants were pleased with the ability to share content between their courses and with other faculty members. Usage has been initially tentative, but with the newly enabled WYSIWYG editor integration, we expect more adoption, and in general expect usage to grow gradually. Several colleges reported using the workflow and sharing capabilities of the system to co-operatively develop college documents.

Quotas

Initial quotas for new users will be set at 100 MB, with Learning System Administrators having the capability to increase that to 200 MB. Colleges are encouraged to use Blackboard Organizations to share content among programs and groups both at colleges and across the VCCS.

e-Portfolios

The pilot provided staff and faculty members with an opportunity to explore the potential uses of ePortfolios. While there was some interest in the ePortfolio feature, most faculty and colleges saw it as a tool having more application for students. The VCCS has not systematically investigated the e-Portfolio software marketplace however and this feature will not be available to students when the Content System is released.

WebDAV

One issue that did arise during the pilot was the ease of use of WebDav (using Microsoft’s Web Folders to manage Content System content). A number of participants encountered difficulties with WebDav and Microsoft's client has known bugs. As a result, ITS is investigating a system-wide license for a software product with better performance managing web folders.

e-Reserves

We are still developing our understanding of the e-Reserves functionality and how it will most effectively integrate with our existing library systems' capabilities. We will work with VCCS and college librarians to effectively implement this functionality.

The Blackboard Content System will be released to all faculty and staff members on November 21, 2005.

Thanks

David

David Carter-Tod
ITS - Client Services Virginia Community College System
dcartertod@vccs.edu

Macromedia Captivate

2005-11-08T12:45:00.000-05:00

New program ready for checkout from library.

I have 50 copies of Macromedia Captivate. If you want one you must email me so I can put you on the checkout list. (We still have 10 Acrobat 6, 23 Macromedia MX and 2 Camtasia Studio/Snag-It licenses left. Please send separate request.)

More Info: http://www.macromedia.com/software/robodemo/

Moving Content

2005-11-01T12:49:00.000-05:00

There is some confusion between the different ways to move course materials from an “old course” to a new blank shell.
There are several ways to do this.
1. Export/Import
2. Archive
3. Copy

Which is best? That’s up to you. Attached are single page Word documents (.doc) that describe the function of each method and the process. If you need help moving content from an old semester to a current semester please contact either me or Jan Klingberg (klingbergj@tncc.edu 825-3880) for help.

Below is a tip about the process I received from an instructor. Please feel free to send your comments and I will pass them along to the group.

Professor’s Tips:

“I have done this twice and have noticed that "Copy" will rearrange the order of items with in Content Areas. I have better luck with "Export" or "Archive" and then an "Import". Because we are not given the "Restore", the archived file that is imported does not contain the student's activity.”

Export Course.doc
Import Package.doc
Copy Course.doc
Archive Course.doc

Spring 2006 Blackboard Requests

2005-11-01T09:30:00.000-05:00

It’s time to request your Spring 2006 Blackboard Shells. Fill out the request form located at: http://tncc.edu/faculty/smith/bb.htm . Requests are processed every Friday. (You must know your section number before you can request a course shell.)

Bb shells created as of November 1, 2005:
82 Distance
53 Distributive
17 Hybrid

Distance-a course taught using Blackboard via the Internet.
Distributive- a course taught using technology (Blackboard) in concert with face-to-face classes.
Hybrid- a course conducted in a combination of traditional classroom lecture and online (Distance Learning) delivery.

TNCC Distance Learning Committee

2005-10-31T09:03:00.000-05:00

TNCC Distance Learning Committee meeting minutes are located at: http://tncc.edu/faculty/smith/dl.htm

Default Passwords REVISION

2005-10-21T14:03:00.000-04:00

From: Ralph Lucia
Sent: Friday, October 21, 2005 10:45

Greetings,

In light of the discussions at ACOP and the decision of the Chancellor regarding passwords, I have revised the documentation regarding default passwords (see attached). Changes are as follows:

Default passwords for existing users will not be erased or overwritten until December 12
Users logging into enterprise applications with default passwords will continue to be directed to the change password feature of My VCCS. Starting December 12, these users will be directed to the Password Wizard.
Password rules no longer require a special character
Password resets by help desk personnel will set a user’s password to his/her birthday for 24 hours instead of 12

One other change was made because of additional information. The Password Wizard will not accept any invalid SSN. All users with blank or invalid SSNs will need to contact their college to reset their password.

The test environment will be ready for colleges at 3:00 p.m. today. This is located at dstst.vccs.edu. The test environment does not include Blackboard or email but does connect to the test SIS environment. The script on the SIS Test login page reflects the action that the production environment will have starting December 12. Default passwords have been erased or overwritten in the test environment. Other passwords reflect those in production as of the date of the last refresh, which was October 14.

Ralph Lucia
Director, Client Services
Virginia Community College System

ATTACHMENT

DEFAULT NOL* PASSWORD ELIMINATION: October 31, 2005

2005-10-19T16:05:00.000-04:00

56% of our current semester students have changed their default passwords!
33% of all TNCC students for the past three semesters have changed their default passwords.

Why does this matter?

It matters Nov. 7th when Spring registration begins
If a student changes their password it can take upwards of one hour to apply in the system
We want to make the registration process smooth and enjoyable for students

What can I do to help?
Announce in ALL your classes that students MUST change their default password immediately to avoid problems, headaches or delays when registering for next semester!

About Password Changing:

Passwords are no longer created for new users. Existing users with default passwords (date of birth) and new users will be stepped through a Password Wizard to create a secure password.
The typical turn around time for the password synchronization is 15 minutes to 1 hour.
The Password Wizard will also serve as a mechanism to allow users who may have forgotten their password to create a new one.
Passwords expire after 180 days.
Passwords Rules
New Passwords cannot:
o Be the same as the user’s username
o Be the same as the current password
o Be the same as the user’s date of birth
o Be all numbers
o Contain spaces
New passwords must be between 6 and 10 characters
Cannot Contain any of the following characters
o ~ Tilde
o & Ampersand
o ` Acute or Back Quote
o { Open or Left Curly Brace

For problems with Password Changing:
Help Desk (helpdesk@tncc.edu, 825-2709)

*NOL – NelsonOnLine (Student Information System) – http://tncc.my.vccs.edu/

Default Passwords

2005-10-15T10:34:00.000-04:00

Posted by Margaret Woodard on Friday, October 14, 2005 - 1:56 pm:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Greetings,

Attached you will find details of the plan to eliminate default (date of birth) passwords from enterprise information systems. This plan has been worked out in consultation with our auditors.

I have also attached an Excel spreadsheet showing the percent of changed passwords in our systems by category. Our plan is to expire the passwords of all active SIS accounts that currently use default passwords. At last count, that is approximately 1.2 million accounts (scroll down on the attached spreadsheet to see this figure). Our schedule shows the release of an updated My VCCS on Wednesday, October 19 in a test environment. When the test environment is ready, colleges will be informed of the URL and given instructions regarding testing. Deployment into production is scheduled for October 31.

Please see that this information is forwarded to the appropriate staff at your college. It is important that the implications of these changes be understood by those impacted.

Thank you for your assistance and cooperation. I know that this process has been difficult on college help desk staff. The result, however, will be a much more secure environment for the information of which we are custodians.

Default Passwords

Changed Password (10/12/05)

Ralph Lucia
Director, Client Services
Virginia Community College System

Spring 2006 course requests

2005-10-10T19:40:00.000-04:00

We are now processing Spring 06 distributive* course requests only. If you need a distance or hybrid course shell or an organization you must call Ruth Smith (825-2807).
Requests will be processed every Friday.

*distributive-using technology (Blackboard) in concert with face-to-face classes

Your must fill out the request form: http://tncc.edu/faculty/smith/bb_new_request.htm

Results of the meetings of the DDLC Commissions

2005-09-30T16:15:00.000-04:00

The following letter and attachment were sent to Vice Chancellor, Academic Services & Research Monty Sullivan from John A. Downey, Ed. D. Chairperson of the VCCS Distance and Distributed Learning Committee. These were the results of the two day DDLC meeting (Sept. 26-27) that I attend in Charlottesville on behave of TNCC.

Monty:

As you are aware, the VCCS Distance and Distributed Learning Committee met earlier this week in Charlottesville. The main focus of the meeting was to examine the issues outlined in the DDLC position paper that was recently endorsed by ASAC. You’ll recall that in the position paper, the DDLC membership made a commitment to provide leadership in addressing the issues that were outlined in the paper. I am very pleased to report that the DDLC made significant progress in that regard. Attached please find a memorandum that summarizes the actions voted upon by the DDLC membership. The memo outlines the process we used to identify the major issues articulated in the position paper and to the recommendations we are making to address those issues.

Specifically, the memo documents several specific recommendations of the DDLC concerning:

1) The advisory role of DDLC in the governance process of the VCCS, relative to Technology Council and ASAC.

2) A process for examining requests from colleges for the VCCS to purchase enterprise software.

3) Suggestions for improving inter-collegiate cooperation in promoting distance learning program partnerships.

4) Suggestions for a process for addressing academic issues associated with Blackboard Community and Content Systems.

5) Identification of recommended functionality for the VCCS portal, regardless of the technology used to create the portal.

As always, on behalf of the entire DDLC, I’d like to express my appreciation to you and Neil for the structure you have created to ensure that an academic perspective is heard in regard to the use of technology to support instruction and instructional support in the VCCS. It was extremely helpful to have staff from both the Academic Services & Research and the Information Technology Services departments of the VCCS. The DDLC remains committed to contributing to the efforts Neil and you have made to ensure that everyone works together toward the same objective to advance the Chancellor’s goals as expressed in Dateline 2009.

I look forward to hearing from you after you have had sufficient time to work with Neil to respond to these recommendations made by the DDLC in the attached memo.

Sincerely,

John

John A. Downey, Ed. D.
Chairperson of the VCCS Distance and Distributed Learning Committee
Vice President for Instruction and Student Services
Blue Ridge Community College
Post Office Box 80
Weyers Cave, VA 24486
downeyj@brcc.edu

Explaination of Last Week's Problem

2005-09-27T16:38:00.000-04:00

Posted on Tuesday, September 27, 2005 - 1:05 pm:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Here is more information as promised on the condition that happened last week where students were temporarily disabled in Blackboard:

Short Answer
The students were temporarily disabled; all of their data was/is completely intact.

Long answer

The process that loads users into Blackboard is called the snapshot process. Essentially, it is a two-step process. Step one is generating flat files of user data from DS2 and PeopleSoft, and step 2 is to load those files into Blackboard.

When the data files are loaded into Blackboard, there are two methods available; snapshot mode and manual mode. Snapshot mode will do one of three things:

1. Add users to Blackboard who are in the snapshot files but not in Blackboard.
2. Modify users in Blackboard with data from the snapshot files.
3. Disable users in Blackboard who are not in the snapshot file.

Manual mode snapshots only do two things:

1. Add users to Blackboard who are in the snapshot files but not in Blackboard.
2. Modify users in Blackboard with data from the snapshot files.

Until Thursday 9/22, we were running the snapshots in snapshot mode. We would only put students in the file that had recent enrollments. Because only students with recent enrollments were put in the file, students who had gone a while without enrollments became disabled. This is why if a student completely dropped all classes, and essentially had no more enrollments, they would get disabled from Blackboard.

At about midnight Wed. night/Thursday morning, an Oracle database link stopped functioning. When the snapshot process ran, it could not contact the PeopleSoft database, and essentially the snapshot file was created without any students in it. Because we were running snapshot mode snapshots, all the students were disabled.

What we did to fix it:

1. We went straight to the database and re-enabled all students account directly. This is just a flag in the database, and as soon as we had realized what had happened, we ran that update against Blackboard.
2. We changed the snapshot process from “snapshot” mode to “manual” mode. With this change, students will no longer ever get disabled---even if they drop all of their courses.

Matt Lawson
Information Technology Services
Virginia Community College System

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Scheduled to begin Monday, September 26, at 7:00 a.m.

2005-09-23T17:40:00.000-04:00

Scheduled to begin Monday, September 26, at 7:00 a.m.

Required Password changes.

Attached (pdf) is a document on how the VCCS will be proceeding in terms of dealing with default passwords.

Problem: After a user resets their passwords; when they next log in to myVCCS, they are able to see their tools list, but clicking on "Blackboard" fails to log them in. If they enter their login information twice more do they get in (once at learn.vccs.edu, and again at the "login failed" page on learn.vccs.edu).

Resolution: The sequence to resolve the cookie problem is to go to Blackboard first and be logged out, then go to My VCCS and try single sign on. What happens is that the (logged out) session_id cookie on Blackboard conflicts with the (valid) session_id cookie from My VCCS.

About NEW passwords: The new passwords must not be all numbers. If users changed their passwords, kept them all numbers, without adding a letter, the system will not verify them. Also it is my understanding that there is a cutoff of 10 spaces for a password. If the student puts in more than 10 they may not realize it is truncated and then will not enter it in correctly.

Security Issue

2005-09-21T18:10:00.000-04:00

From: administrator@email.vccs.edu [mailto:administrator@email.vccs.edu]
Sent: Wed 9/21/2005 5:12 PMTo: administrator@email.vccs.edu
Subject: All students and faculty

The following two messages were received 9/22 and 9/21 (reverse order). Please encourage your students to change their password from their birthdate to a secure password. If they have trouble doing this refer them to TNCC Client Services - helpdesk@tncc.edu (825-2709). Faculty Should also change their password if they are still using their birthday.

Thank you,
Ruth

Students and Faculty,The Virginia Community College System is currently engaged in a process of strengthening the security of its enterpriseapplications (Blackboard, email, SIS, etc.). An integral partof this process is ensuring that users of these systems do not continue to use the default passwords that are initially provided.

Over the next several days a series of steps will be taken to remind users of the need to change default passwords. Soon, default passwords will no longer be allowed beyond the initial login. If you have not already done so, please change your password. Links to the password change function are provided at the login pages of enterprise applications.

Virginia Community College System
Information Technology Services

Posted on Wednesday, September 21, 2005 - 4:52 pm:

The following message was sent out today at 3:42 p.m.
-----
From: Neil Matkin [mailto:nmatkin@vccs.edu] Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2005 3:42 PM To: Glenn DuBois; dlist_vccs_presidents; dlist_vccs_technology_council; dlist_system_office_cabinet Cc: dlist_vccs_presidents_secretaries; Susan Hayden; Ralph Lucia; James Davis; John Brilliant Subject: Security Issue

Friends,

I have been on the telephone with a reporter from the Roanoke Times this afternoon and an issue has arisen that is about to appear in print in that paper. I request your immediate attention to this security related issue.

Background:

In the last few months the ITS office and College IT offices have upgraded PeopleSoft SIS, Blackboard, and student e-mail systems. In conjunction with these upgrades, a new directory services application was initiated. Directory Services version 2 enabled all VCCS students to access student systems through a single sign on. The default password that has been used is the student's birthday. Students have the option of changing the password, however, today 74% of all students HAVE NOT CHANGED THE PASSWORD. Members of the Technology Council and John Brilliant, Internal Auditor, will recall past discussions dating back to March 2005 relating to default passwords for students and the need to move away from student birth dates. Plans to move away from birth dates have been underway for some time. Directory Services 2 has code in place that allows the VCCS to plug this hole and remove the threat.

Issue:

During the last year, a particular web site has become increasingly popular among students. Known as the FACE BOOK, this website gives students the opportunity to link to friends and meet people at our colleges and other colleges and universities throughout the state, nation, and world. Participants in the FACE BOOK record various biographic information INCLUDING THEIR BIRTH DATES to share with other members. The end result is that subscribers to the FACE BOOK could easily use the birth date data and access student accounts not belonging the them. Although we are not aware of a single instance where this has happened, the newspaper reporter that called today has been in conversation with at least one VCCS student relating to this issue. The minute this article hits the newsstands, we have a major problem in that students who subscribe to FACE BOOK may have easy access to our student systems.

Steps Taken Earlier Today by the ITS Office:

PHASE1: ITS has already made the following changes to encourage users to create secure passwords. Login screens of enterprise applications will include instructions and a link to the change password feature of my.vccs.
This will include:

Email (Mirapoint)
Email (AtMail)
SIS Blackboard 6
Blackboard 5

Below is the message students will see:

Default passwords are not secure. If you are still using the default password initially provided to you, please go to the Change Password page.

Users using a default password in my.vccs will see the following:
Warning: Default passwords are not secure. Please Change Your Password.

NOTE: In addition, a broadcast email to ALL STUDENTS will go out before 5 p.m. this afternoon advising students to change their passwords and provide a link to do so.

Steps Colleges Should Take Immediately:

PHASE 1 Recommended for Colleges

It is recommended that colleges immediately begin to review the instructions they provide to students regarding default passwords. In a quick survey of what various colleges are doing, weve noticed that Blue Ridge and John Tyler are doing an excellent job in this regard (there may be others as well).

http://www.brcc.edu/computing/student/accounts/Default.htm

http://www.jtcc.edu/jtpassport/StudentMyVCCS

Colleges may wish to begin to explore the help desk staffing changes that will be required to support the next phases of this process. Every change to enterprise applications has the potential to generate increased call volume and support requests. The move away from default passwords will also generate more requests for password resets.

Next Steps:

Attached please find a Word document which details additional implementation phases to ensure that our systems are operating in the most secure manner possible. I have asked my assistant, Sally Love, to schedule a conference call at 1 p.m. Friday, September 23, 2005 for Technology Council members or other college staff to discuss these next steps and would appreciate it if a representative from each college can be available. Sally will send out dial in instructions. Please have appropriate staff review the attached document in order to provide feedback as we move forward quickly to address this issue.

Please e-mail or call with questions or concerns
(nmatkin@vccs.edu)
Many thanks,
Neil

David Carter-Tod
ITS - Client Services Virginia Community College System
dcartertod@vccs.edu

Attachment

A Note from the new "kid" :-)

2005-09-13T11:00:00.000-04:00

Salutations! I am Jan Klingberg, Thomas Nelson’s newest Instructional Designer. Some of you may know me as “Ruth Smith’s Clone” or “Ruth Smith II”. (*grin*) I come to you from Old Dominion University’s Darden College of Education, where I teach interactive, project-based online courses as adjunct faculty. I also have 20 years experience teaching computer courses for the Norfolk Public Schools.

As Instructional Designer, I will provide an array of workshops and training sessions for Thomas Nelson’s faculty and staff. Consultations are available for individuals or groups on any instructional technology need. I have used Blackboard 6 extensively, and look forward to helping our faculty employ sound instructional design principals while providing a technologically advanced, easily-accessible and world class education for our students. I am here to help faculty utilize available technology at Thomas Nelson Community College to add a compelling “third dimension” to their instruction.

To contact me for assistance in planning and implementing the integration of technology into your instruction here at Thomas Nelson, please do so in any of the following ways. I am delighted to be at TNCC, and look forward to working with you at the workshops listed below, and in the future.

Temporary Office: Wythe Hall 249-C
Office Phone: 825-3880
Email: klingbergj@tncc.edu

Blackboard 5 Restoration Info

2005-09-13T10:58:00.000-04:00

Posted on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 - 9:45 am:

The following message was sent to Tech Council, Academic VPs and CSLS initially yesterday evening and with a url correction this morning:
----
The Blackboard 5 URL http://bb5.vccs.edu/will be available again to users at 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, September 13, 2005. We have substantially restored all missing files, but it is possible that there may be some that are still missing in some courses. The restore process has been done incrementally going back a few months at a time, and is in its final stages. Any missing files should be restored in the next few days. Thank you for your patience during this outage. VCCS ITS Client Services Email - mailto:CSsupport@vccs.eduPhone - (804) 423-6757 Fax - (540) 591-5871.

David Carter-Tod ITS -
Client Services Virginia Community College System
dcartertod@vccs.edu

Information about Bb5 Outage

2005-08-31T17:50:00.000-04:00

David Carter-Tod (ITS - Client Services, Virginia Community College System) posted the following on Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - 4:17 pm

IF YOU ARE A FACULTY THAT NEEDS ACCESS TO Bb5 READ THE FOLLOWING CAREFULLY AND CONTACT ME- RUTH SMITH (smithru@tncc.edu) 825-2807 BEFORE DONING ANYTHING!

The following message has just been sent to the Technology Council, Academic Vice-Presidents, and CSLs.

---
On August 23, the Blackboard 5 environment experienced a catastrophic failure. Since that time, VCCS engineers have been working diligently to restore service. The length of the outage as well as its severe impact on those students and faculty using the system requires a more detailed explanation than has been provided to date. I will therefore attempt to summarize events as best I can.

The cause appears to have been a hardware failure impacting the storage system of the shared content file system where any files attached to courses are stored. The storage system consists of an array of hard drives similar to those found in a desktop computer, though much faster in terms of read and writes times. To ensure against the failure of any one hard drive, these drives are configured to redundantly store all data across all drives in the array. In the event of a failure, the information stored on a failed disk can be reconstructed using the data on the remaining ones.

It would appear that the Blackboard 5 system experienced multiple disk failures resulting in a corrupt file system that is not recoverable. The system is, however, backed up onto tapes for just such an event. The VCCS uses a backup system from IBM called Tivoli Storage Manager. The last backup of the system was performed on August 13, just prior to the release of the new Blackboard environment, Blackboard 6. VCCS engineers are now working to restore the Blackboard system from these backup tapes. The immense size of the file system (approximately 12 million files) which serves all 23 colleges in the VCCS system has complicated the restore process. The restore process has failed several times with each attempt taking up to 14 hours. This has resulted in a much longer outage than was originally anticipated.

The problems experienced are complex and extremely difficult to overcome given the long time required for each attempt. At this point, we have completed a partial restore and can allow access to those users with an urgent need. It must be understood, however, that the file system is only partially restored at this point. Users will occasionally find broken links or missing content. This is to be expected at this stage.

Below are some guidelines for instructors using the partially restored system:

From a user perspective what may be missing are files that were attached to course elements, for example, uploaded .doc files or .ppt files. These could be in regular content areas (e.g. Course Information, Syllabus) or in quizzes where images were used.

Faculty:

Do not remove broken links, the missing content will be restored in due time. If the link is removed, the content will not be accessible once the restore is complete.
Missing content may be available from courses copied to Blackboard 6 or from local college backups of Blackboard courses. If content that is critical to users is missing in Blackboard 5, but available in Blackboard 6, faculty may choose to upload it to Blackboard 5 for use during this restoration period. We recommend that it is uploaded as a new item rather than replacing a missing content item.
Students must be informed of the limitations of the current Blackboard 5 environment and be asked to refrain from calling the college help desk or their Blackboard Administration to report missing content or broken links.

The partially restored Blackboard 5 environment can be accessed by going to the link below.

http://164.106.66.46/, as well as the link from Blackboard 6, will continue to show the outage notice until the restore process is complete.

Engineers believe they have resolved the issues that have caused previous restoration attempts to fail. The restoration of all missing content has begun, but will be initially written to another location to allow users to access the system during the process. When the restoration is complete, a short outage will be required to add the restored content to the system. This outage will be announced in advance. It is anticipated that the restore process now underway will take at least two days to complete.

It is important to note that the vulnerabilities of the Blackboard 5 environment have been largely eliminated in the Blackboard 6 environment. Not only is a failure of this type much less likely, the restoration would also be easier and quicker. I will address this topic in more detail later.

Please feel free to contact me if you have questions.

Ralph Lucia

Blackboard Statistics!

2005-08-30T13:44:00.000-04:00

Blackboard Statistics for Fall 2005
(as of August 29, 2005)

400 courses
135 instructors
7328 students loaded

Hits to the Support Site for Distance and Distributive Learning
http://Tncc.edu/blackboard

Week of 8/22 – 8/28/05

11,665 page views
5,717 visits
2,333 unique visitors

Month of August (through 8/29)

23,838 page views
11,797 visits
3,825 unique visitors

Year-to-date

151,574 page views
104,474 visits
18,427 unique visitors

Keep up the good work!!!!

Respondus, Softchalk and Impatica

2005-08-19T18:56:00.000-04:00

Posted on Thursday, August 18, 2005 - 4:02 pm:

We have deployed a VCCS Faculty Software module on the Teach tab that links to download and installation for Respondus, Softchalk and Impatica.

It is set as removable and is also visible for placement.

Thanks David

David Carter-Tod
ITS - Client Services Virginia Community College System
dcartertod@vccs.edu

Blackboard Admin. Meeting Minutes 8/12/05

2005-08-15T11:48:00.000-04:00

I've pulled out the revelant portions from the minutes (.pdf):

Changing Passwords
A couple of Blackboard Administrators reported that they are having problems with the instructor’s password in Blackboard 6 reverting to the date of birth.
One of the causes is that data integrity is now being enforced between Blackboard and My VCCS. If someone’s password “switches” to their date of birth, it is because it now synching their passwords. The reason for this issue has not occurred previously was in Blackboard 5, faculty accounts and passwords were created and managed in the GUI. However, in Blackboard 6, accounts are managed through My VCCS. If you have a faculty member whose password reverts to their date of birth, please direct them to the change my password in My VCCS to create a new, more secure password. Password changes are real time from My VCCS to other enterprise systems (please note that passwords in bbtrain and turtle are not updated.)
Another issue that was reported was that instructors are prompted to login when they try to access Blackboard through single sign-on. The ITS Blackboard team has not been able to reproduce this problem. If a user experiences this problem, please open an IssueTrak help ticket.

Blackboard System Settings
Personal Information and Address Book
The personal information and address book are currently turned on in production. These need to be disabled for users, since user data is updated in PeopleSoft. (Note: This setting was changed Friday, August 12 after the meeting.)

Self Enroll Setting
A Blackboard Administrator requested that the “self enrollment” setting be turned
on for faculty to allow students to self enroll in courses, without being batch loaded based on their PeopleSoft registration. Currently self-enrollment is turned off as a feature at the individual course level. This means that an individual instructor cannot turn it on, but a system administrator may do so by accessing the properties of the course from the System Admin control panel. The ITS Blackboard team was told this was inconvenient to have to do this now, when instructors were allowed to do this in Blackboard 5 themselves. It was also mentioned that self-enrollment would be helpful for Organizations.

New Student Email System!

2005-08-13T09:28:00.000-04:00

The new student email system went live Firday, August 13, 2005. The transition was transparent and successful and should pose no problems to your students.

Students' old mail is located at http://oldmail.vccs.edu/ and will be available until September 30, 2005. When students login to their email, they will see directions for forwarding all important messages that they may wish to keep. If you want to view what the students will see go to: https://email.vccs.edu/wm.

All documentation on the new student email (including FAQs) is located at: https://helpnet.vccs.edu/mirapoint/.

Faculty can also 'preview' the new system by logging in with their SIS/Blackboard UserID and password.

Students Loaded into Bb6!

2005-08-05T18:32:00.000-04:00

I will begin loading students into FA05 courses on Monday and continue loading daily until the end of the Add period. As always I load but do not "drop". Please monitor you SIS lists!
-Ruth

Posted on Friday, August 05, 2005 - 6:17 pm:

We are pleased to announce that users (staff, faculty, and students) along with their primary and secondary roles have been successfully loaded in Blackboard 6 (learn.vccs.edu). One item to note is that students are active and enabled in learn.vccs.edu. Initially we said that they would be disabled, but we have discovered that as disabled, you would not be able to enroll them into your courses. If this poses a problem/challenge for you or your college, please let us know.

A couple items to note. Updates are passed from directory services to Blackboard twice daily, with the update process finishing at about 3:00 AM and 3:00 PM. Currently, password changes are only being passed to Blackboard according to this update schedule, but by go-live on Aug. 15, password updates will be real-time.

Additionally, if you are wondering why you have role "X" or don’t have role "Y", early next week we will provide detailed documentation as to the processes and algorithms for assigning primary and secondary roles.

David, Sue Ann, and Matt

VCCS Technology Projects Update

2005-08-05T16:57:00.000-04:00

August 2, 2005

Greetings,

There are many critical projects that ITS staff members are working on at this time. The intent of this e-mail is to provide the colleges with updates on two of the projects that are nearing implementation.

Blackboard 6 Update

The upgrade of our Blackboard system is proceeding well and everything is on target for the August 15 upgrade to the version 6. With this new version, faculty and staff will have additional functionality, more flexibility and a greater capacity to enhance learning within the VCCS.

Preparations for this upgrade have been underway for the past year. ITS staff has been working with college Blackboard administrators, academic representatives and Blackboard consultants to optimize the configuration of the upgraded Blackboard environment so as to best serve our students, and to ensure a smooth transition.

There are three components to the upgraded Blackboard (version 6.2):

The Learning System: This is the core course management system that students and faculty are familiar with, but it comes with new capabilities and new features that make it easier to use and a more flexible tool.
The Community System: This is the entry way into Blackboard. With the addition of the Community System colleges now have the capability of branding the Blackboard environment with its own logo and color scheme. Additionally, colleges will now have the capability of personalizing the system display and targeting information to specific groups of users.
The Content System: This is a tool to ease simultaneous content use across multiple courses and enable easy file storage and integration into courses. It also provides for document collaboration, and sharing. Additionally, faculty will have dedicated space where they can store documents and other digital files. Content System planning is currently in process. A six-week pilot is scheduled to start this September. Colleges participating in the pilot are GCC, JSRCC, PVCC, NVCC, NRCC, RCC, SVCC, and VWCC. Deployment to all VCCS faculty is scheduled for mid November 2005 for full use in production spring 2006.
To recap some key dates and what has happened thus far:

To recap some key dates and what has happened thus far:
February, March, & May – Blackboard System Administrator training was provided to every college’s Blackboard System Administrator and back-up
April – Blackboard professional training was provided to faculty at the New Horizons Conference
May – All course content was migrated from Blackboard 5 to the Blackboard 6 environment
June 1 – VCCS faculty were given access so that they could begin working with the new system and developing course content
June – Strategy sessions were conducted with college representatives to prepare for the deployment of the Community System
June – The Community System was demonstrated to colleges remotely
June - July – Workshops were conducted to help colleges prepare their branded sites within the Community System
July – Content System strategy session held with representatives from colleges and the System Office to plan the pilot and initial implementation
August 1 - Final requests for Community System setup due
Here are some critical dates yet to come.
- August 5 - Student accounts loaded into Blackboard 6
(accounts will be unavailable for use until the 15th)
- August 15 - Blackboard 6 available to students
- September 19 – Content System Pilot begins
Following the deployment of the upgraded Blackboard environment ITS will work with Blackboard Administrators and other college representatives to coordinate the deployment of additional features that are now available within the new version of Blackboard. An incremental implementation of the new features is being planned to ease the transition and to allow each college time to provide training and instruction prior to the release of each new feature.

Thanks to everyone at the colleges who has worked with us during the training, strategy, and implementation. College staff and administration have generously given of their time this summer to make this upgrade a success. This has truly been a team effort between the colleges and ITS staff.

VCCS Student Email - Mirapoint

The Student Email sub-committee of the VCCS Technology Council concluded their work in late April 2005 and recommended the purchase of Mirapoint as the replacement product. Based on this recommendation and excellent references received from several Universities where the product is currently deployed, the ITS Office entered into negotiations with Mirapoint in early May 2005. Those discussions concluded with VCCS issuing a purchase order to purchase Mirapoint. Mirapoint is a state-of-the-art e-mail solution providing a web based interface where our students will be able to access their email and related email services from any place where there is access to the Internet.

The Mirapoint project is proceeding on schedule with an expected "Go-Live" date of August 12, 2005. A small group of participants from the colleges and the ITS Office have been actively testing the new system since the week of July 11th with good results to this point. A larger group with representatives from each college will continue testing over the next two weeks to isolate and correct several minor problems encountered during the early testing phase. If any issue should be discovered that may affect the timeline we will notify you immediately. Also, work is progressing on completing end user documentation and training materials. Additional information regarding the release of training materials, the deployment schedule, and a “to do list” for the colleges will be available prior to the “Go Live” date. Please contact Karlin Sink (KSink@vccs.edu) or 804.423.5631 should you have any questions or require additional information.

Please feel free to contact me with questions or concerns,

Neil

H. Neil Matkin
Vice Chancellor, Information Technology Services
Virginia Community College System
101 N. 14th Street
Richmond, VA 23219

nmatkin@vccs.edu
804.819.4991 (Office)
804.918.4769 (Facsimile)

Cartridge Import Errors

2005-08-04T11:54:00.000-04:00

Posted on Thursday, August 04, 2005 - 10:30 am:

We have had a number of faculty contact us about cartridge import errors, particularly with assessments. The usual error is along the lines of:
" The content item entitled "Multiple Choice Quiz" contained a link to an assessment. This link has been removed. Add the assessment to a content area and select Create an Announcement to create a new announcement with a link to the assessment."

The bottom line on these errors is that the import process for a cartridge does not delete the assessments, but it deletes the links to the assessments. This is standard behavior for a lot of cartridges in Blackboard 6. Faculty will need to use the Add Test option in the content spaces to add the links back.

David Carter-Tod ITS - Client Services Virginia Community College System

Blackborad 5 Incompletes

2005-07-25T09:13:00.000-04:00

Students with an incomplete grade from spring and summer 2005 courses will have access to Blackboard 5 through December 31, 2005 to complete their work.

Blackboard 6 (http://learn.vccs.edu) will be available to students on August 15. At the same time, the current Blackboard url (http://bb.vccs.edu) will be redirected to Blackboard 6
(http://learn.vccs.edu). After this date, the only way to get to Blackboard 5 will be by a new url (http://bb5.vccs.edu). On August 16, all courses on Blackboard 5 will be made unavailable to
students.

Instructors have two options for students with an incomplete in a Blackboard course site:
Option 1: Moving Content to Blackboard 6 - http://learn.vccs.edu/ The faculty member can request from their college Blackboard Administrator that the course be exported from Blackboard 5 and imported into Blackboard 6 (all enrolled students from spring and
summer 2005 will have accounts in the new Blackboard 6). The student can then be enrolled in the course site. Student course data (grades, drop box postings, discussion board posts, etc.) will not be brought over to the new system. This is a good option for students that only need access to course content.

Option 2: Completing the course in Blackboard 5 - http://bb5.vccs.edu/ The second option is for the student to complete the course in Blackboard 5. All student accounts will remain in Blackboard 5. The risk with this option is that the Blackboard 5 system is no longer a
supported environment. Blackboard will end support for Blackboard 5 in September 2005, and the VCCS will not have any official support after our August 15 Blackboard 6 Go Live date.
If an instructor would like to use Blackboard 5 for an incomplete, it is the instructor’s responsibility to make the course available to students and to communicate the url for the course location (http://bb5.vccs.edu).To make the course available to students, go to the course ControlPanel, select Course Settings and then set Course Availability to Yes.

Exceptions and Constraints
If a college has a significant number of courses that should be left available after August 16, please submit them on a spreadsheet on an IssueTrak help ticket. The issue type is Blackboard 5. Blackboard 5 may only be used for incompletes and courses that started before August 15. If instructors foresee a reason for students to have access beyond that date, the course will need to be exported and imported into Blackboard 6. Faculty may also log on to Blackboard 5 to retrieve content that they still need from there. Faculty should be aware however that the server, while functional, will not be actively maintained as a production server.

Blackboard 5 will no longer be available after December 31, 2005.

Changes to DSII (tncc.my.vccs.edu)

2005-07-19T10:55:00.000-04:00

Posted by Matt Lawson on Tuesday, July 19, 2005 - 10:22 am:

For learn.vccs.edu, passwords are not yet synchronized real-time with directory. By go-live, (actually sometime before) there will be real-time password synchronization with learn.vccs.edu and directory services.

Currently, there is password synchronization, but it is done as a batch process twice a day at 11 AM and 11 PM. So if a user's password is changed in learn.vccs.edu, at 11AM/PM it will be synchronized back to directory.

If a user changes their password in directory, it wont get updated in learn.vccs.edu until 11AM/11PM.
http://tncc.my.vccs.edu/ (Directory Services II)

Blackboard Performance Testing

2005-07-15T17:24:00.000-04:00

Posted by David Carter-Tod on Friday, July 15, 2005 - 4:45 pm:

Over the next three weeks we will be performance testing our Blackboard 6 system with a Blackboard Engineering Consultant.

Each night from 6:00 p.m. until 10:00 p.m., the system may be slow or unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

It is, however, critical work as we prepare to ensure a seamless start to the Fall semester.

Thank you Matt, David and Sue Ann

Student Access and Blackboard 5

2005-07-15T13:37:00.000-04:00

Students will be given access to this Blackboard 6 system on August 15 at 8 a.m.
At that time, bb.vccs.edu will start to redirect to learn.vccs.edu.
To access the previous Blackboard 5 system, all users will need to go to bb5.vccs.edu.

PeopleSoft Integration with Blackboard

2005-07-08T18:25:00.000-04:00

Posted by David Carter-Tod on Friday, July 08, 2005

One of the elements that we have discussed and planned for with Blackboard 6 was the automatic creation of classes based on PeopleSoft data and the resulting automatic enrollment management that would come with that. As we have indicated in our meetings, we have been working towards implementing that for Fall.

However, we are at the point where we need to reconsider that deadlinefor a number of reasons.

Our top priority is system stability and performance. Dedicating resources to the integration work will consume time that we need to spend on these elements.

After reviewing the business processes at all the colleges, we understand that there is a wide variety in practice at the colleges. We need more time to work together as a group to come to a consensus as to how best implement the integration. We have focused on introducing the new functionality, most notably the roles in the Community System. The roles in the Community System have formed the groundwork for our implementation of the Content System which is targeted to be released to all instructors in November. With theContent System in place, it will change how faculty manage and store their content for their courses. One consideration has been that many instructors merge and collapse course sections in order to not edit the same piece of content in multiple locations. We need the additional time this fall to study how faculty usage may change withthe implementation of the Content System and use that data to inform how we do our integrations.

We will convene an integration workgroup this fall to begin working onthe integration. We plan to have the group use the data gathered fromthe Blackboard course creation and enrollment business process interviews to draft a recommendation on how best to proceed with theintegration of Peoplesoft user and course data with Blackboard.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Matt, Sue Ann and David

Bb 6 Internal Server Error Explanation

2005-06-19T11:10:00.000-04:00

Explanation for the following frequently encounter Bb6 error message :

Internal Server Error

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, learn@vccs.edu and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Apache/1.3.33 Server at utbc02b04v02.vccs.edu Port 800

Posted by David Carter-Tod on Saturday, June 18, 2005 - 8:50 pm:

By way of explanation as to why some people might get the error andothers will not.

When you log on to Blackboard 6, one of the cookies that is set is "BB6ProdBigIP". This identifies which backend application server your session goes against. It has an 8-hour expiration, so once it is set, you will typically continue to go against that application server.

Others (even the person at the next computer) may be going against another server and keep going against that server. If one server is having a problem, it will only show up if your session is tied to that problem server via the cookie.

If you delete the cookie, you might be reassigned back to the same server, but with luck you might be assigned to a working server.

We are working on addressing this issue so that our load balancer ismore intelligent about detecting internal server errors and will re-assign people automatically when they occur.

Thanks

David