Just to keep you informed of the status of other known and reported (to Jan Bottorf, PASSHE, Persidium-BB Support) issues for MU, here is a list:

1.       Roster/Gradebook

Students who dropped courses were being removed successfully from courses for the first 2 weeks of the semester, but the third week… all drops are showing.

Students who withdrew, even prior to the first day of the semester, have appeared in your course lists too.

The process that you were emailed by Jan Bottorf, to change the properties on these students and manually make them unavailable, doesn’t seem to remove these students from your rosters or gradebooks either.  If you have been able to successfully remove your drops and adds from both your user list and gradebook, please let me know.  I haven’t heard from anyone that has been successful and I would appreciate feedback.

We have been working with Sytec, the group that manages our data feeds for the PASSHE system, on the “drop” issue.

2.       Course – Section Combines

If you followed the procedures we sent to combine courses using Course-Copy-Enrollment, you should have been able to successfully combine your course sections.  Although, you received a message from Jan Bottorf that this process wasn’t working.  At MU we weren’t experiencing any problems with this process.  We were seeing some problems with students that were manually added (one at a time) using Enroll User in the Control Panel of the course.  Some students who were manually entered by faculty became disabled in the data feed that evening, but we weren’t seeing every student in the section disabled or large numbers of disabled students.  So… we ask that you don’t enroll users that should be coming from the WebAdvisor data feed.   If you have a problem with a student that doesn’t appear after they claim they submitted an “add” slip to the Registrars Office, check WebAdvisor first, wait until after the data feed (approx. 6:15 p.m. each day), check your course, and contact us the next morning. 

From feedback I’ve obtained from MU faculty, this can successfully be done.  If you need assistance with this process, please let me know.

3.       Assessments –

All assessments are made available in the Content Area now rather than in the Assessment Manager.  This is not a bug, but a change with version 6.  You can create assessments with Blackboard or Respondus 2.0 (quicker method) with the "personality" set to Blackboard 6.x, but the process has changed that sets the availability.  The availability is now set within the Content Area (assignments, course documents, etc.)  Use the new Test icon to add the test to the Content Area and set the availability options (dates, passwords, etc.)  If you need assistance with this process, please let me know. 

Problem - If you created tests using test pools (publisher test banks or your own) in Blackboard 5, the tests appeared to transfer to your Blackboard 6 course shell.  However, when you went to take the test, it would give an error – spec. object not found.  At this time, you have to delete the test from the assessment area in Bb 6, recreate the test (from a pool) with Blackboard 6 or Respondus with the Bb 6 personality selected, enter the Control Panel and content area where you would like to place the assessment (assignments – quiz folder), and use the new Test icon to make it available.  A very time consuming task, but pools reduce cheating.

Problem – The code MU obtained from another university, that prevented students from copying or printing questions in Bb 5 assessments and provided added security for assessments, does not appear to be usable in Blackboard 6.  At this time, there is a new option in Blackboard 6 that will allow questions to be presented one at a time… this will not stop users from printing, but it will waste tons of paper to print the entire exam and may deter some from bothering.  In combination with a test pool, this is the best suggestion we have for now. 

If you have questions or would like to report what you believe is a problem, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Blackboard at MU – (resource page):

http://acs.mnsfld.edu/Blackboard.htm

Tamela Bastion
I.T. Training Coordinator
tbastion@mansfield.edu