Ask Nancy

MS Word vs Blackboard

2009-10-30T13:16:00Z

Quite often when people are working on materials for their Blackboard course sites the documents that they want use already exist as Micrsoft Word documents so the tendency is to copy and paste from that document into the Blackboard text editor. When you do that Word makes its own HTML and the result when the document goes into Blackboard does not always look the way that it did when you created it. You may find things misaligned, unformated, no margins and in general looking very disorganized. This does not happen 100% of the time but it occurs quite frequently.

Now I would never suggest walking away from using Word to do the documents for your course, I would however suggest that once you have finished and saved it as a Word document (.doc or docx) that you also save the document in a format that will be more digestible for Blackboard. When you select Save As in the File Menu (2003) or from the Office Button (2007) you will get a pop up window that will ask you what location you want to save to and the bottom most drop down will allow you to save the document in a different file format. I would reommend plain text (.txt) this will allow for a smooth transition into Blackboard and you can then make any formatting changes with the aid of the tools provided in the text editor.

When Uploaded Files are Corrupt

2009-10-28T18:04:00Z

I have previously written about the issue of files being zipped when they make the transiton into Blackboard. I have now become aware of other reason that things may become zipped when they are attached. This comes from the "Behind the Blackboard" knowledge base and I thought it was something that you shoud be aware of. They have also provided some alternative suggestions.

When files uploaded by students are corrupted
Issue
There are instances where Instructors are downloading student assignment submissions which are corrupted. In some instances this corruption has occurred unintentionally through a glitch in the process, however in other instances students have deliberately uploaded corrupted files in order to gain extensions on their submissions.

Symptoms
Problems that the instructor may encounter are:

Downloading a zip file that cannot be opened
Downloading a Word document or PDF submission that is unreadable
SafeAssign cannot process the corrupted document

Cause
The nature of a corrupted file is that it cannot be opened or read by the intended program. Hence there is no straightforward way to determine whether the corruption occurred unintentionally through some glitch in the normal course of business (for example the students computer could have inadvertently corrupted the file while saving, or there may have been internet connection issues when uploading the file) or whether the student has uploaded a file which is deliberately corrupted.

There are companies that are now selling to students pre-corrupted files. One such website that has been brought to our attention is http://www.corrupted-files.com/Home.html . This website offers students corrupted Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other files that they can send to their Instructors in order to buy more time to finish the assignment. By the time that the Instructor has noticed that they cannot open the file, the student can then send "another copy" of the assignment - now completed with the extra time that they have had to complete it.

Analysis
There is no easy way to determine whether a file was deliberately corrupted. A teacher will need to base their decision on the student's own integrity. There are measures that can reduce the chance of innocent users submitting corrupted files and other methods that can help reduce the risk of such cheating. If you have methods that you or your institution employ please feel free to leave a comment below and we will add these to the list.

Workaround
One way to reduce the risk of inadvertent corruption is to have the student submit their assignments in two formats. For example in both Word and as a plain text file or HTML file. Plain text and HTML files are far less likely to be corrupted and can always be opened, even if parts of the file are missing. More importantly, the odds of both files being simultaneously corrupted without the student noticing are very low.

Even a deliberately corrupted file can still be viewed in a hex-editor (such as UltraEdit), and any actual text can be extracted from it with a number of data recovery tools. Therefore it IS typically possible (although very technical and not for the faint of heart) to prove that a given file was NOT actually an attempt at homework X but rather some generic document. Advising students of this early on and threatening them with disciplinary action if they are found cheating are the most successful prevention methods.

Nancy

Video in Your Course Website, NOT IMPOSSIBLE

2009-10-20T14:33:00Z

Video in your course website no longer needs to be time consuming and difficult to manage. There are many sites out there these days that have materials that will work in your course and they are easy to include in your site. Let's start with some of the sources for online video:

YouTube is probably the prime source. I know what you are thinking, "dancing hamsters and Susan Boyle" but YouTube has come a long way. There is an Education Chanel on YouTube that includes material from Stanford and Dartmouth to Cambridge University.
Ted - Ideas Worth Spreading has materials on topics from technology and science to arts and culture. The speakers include; Isabel Allende, Robert Ballard, Jeff Bezos, Bono, Richard Branson, Gordon Brown, Bill Clinton, and Peter Gabriel just to mentions a few.
HULU has a great deal of commercial broadcast video but if you make a concerted effort you may find useful materials.
Odeo sharing both video and audio content
Academic Earth video courses from a wide variety of colleges and universities.
There is also a wide variety of current materials available from places like CNN

OK so now you have found just the right video clip that makes just the point you want and you are wondering how to get it into your course site. What you need to look for is the something that says, "Embed" or "Embed This". What you will see there is a long string of code that you should select and copy.

In Blackboard all you need do is create an item. You will not paste the code into the editor as you see it when you start an item you will want to have it in HTML mode and you get this by clicking the icon with the facing angle brackets <> (in your editing window you will see this phrase, "You are in HTML Source mode. Use the [<>] button to switch back to normal mode.")paste the code there and then as always click submit.

Two things you need to be aware of one is the video itself may slow down the page as it loads into Blackboard and you need to make sure that the video itself is still posted on the site where you accessed it.

Nancy

The New Blog in Town

2009-10-20T14:12:00Z

You may be used to coming here for suggestions regarding the use of Blackboard in your courses online or other wise. However there's a new blog on the block that may help to support your teaching in different way. Peter Shea Pedogogical Instructional Designer for the Title III project has started "Middlelearn" with the purpose is to advertise learning tools, articles, and research that instructors & staff can use. Go and see what he has to offer:

http://middlelearn.blogspot.com/

Prepare for an Emergency

2009-10-05T18:09:00Z

Would you be prepared if something happened and you could not teach your class? It doesn’t matter if it’s the H1N1 flu or a broken limb there is always that chance of an extended emergency. These emergencies apply to your students as well as you. Blackboard is a college wide tool that offers instructors the option to interact with their students outside of the face-to-face classroom. Using Blackboard in such a case would require some advance preparation. If this option of emergency preparation is something that interests you Middlesex Interactive will be offering 3 upcoming workshops:

• Wednesday Evening 10/07/09, in the Kerouac room of the Lowell Campus Library 4:00pm – 6:00pm.
• Saturday Morning 10/24/09, in the Alcott room of the Bedford Campus Library 8:00am – 10:00am.
• Wednesday Afternoon 10/14/09, in the Kerouac room of the Lowell Campus Library 2:00pm – 4:00pm

Please let us know if you would like to attend by sending an email to distance_ed@middlesex.mass.edu please include the date and time you would like to attend. Please note there is an underscore between distance and ed.

We have also made some of our training materials available on our public webpage.

Thankfully Shorter Course Lists

2009-09-24T12:55:00Z

Some of you may have noticed that your course lists are shorter this morning than they have been in the past. Well this is all thanks to our technical connection/genius Matthew Scales of the IT staff. He has created the module that handles the course list that gets created on the MyMCC portal page. Due to many requests from more than a few people with VERY long lists of courses (including Me) he has made it so that any course that is unavailable to students is pulled up under the subheading in the list titled "Unavailable Courses". When you float your cursor over that subheading you will get a drop down menu with links to those unavailable courses.

Matt, Thank You very much for your help with this situation. I am sure that it will be much appreciated.

NANC

Blackboard Integration into Identity Management

2009-08-26T15:32:00Z

As you may or may not know by now there has been a change in the way classes are handled by Blackboard. Over the past year Middlesex Interactive and Information Technologies have worked together to find a way to make the enrollment of students easier. We are having our first run with our process for the Fall semester.

This integration of Blackboard with the colleges Identity Management system will have the following benefits:

Provide students with more timely and accurate access to their courses in Blackboard
Remove out-of-date enrollment information from Blackboard
Include students real names in email addresses(e.g. "Joe Student a12345@middlesex.mass.edu")

Changes to Process

All sections created in Banner will have a Blackboard course site (the sections pulled from Banner are the ones that will be managed by this process).
Course titles are now managed by the system. If you change the couse title, it will revert back to the Banner course title.
Because access to Blackboard courses is now managed through identity management (IDM), students not registered in Banner will not have access to managed courses in Blackboard.
Students will be automatically added to, or dropped from, corresponding Blackboard course rosters in less than 24 hours from the information being entered into Banner. If a student informs you that he or she does not have access to his or her Blackboard course, please check the class roster in Middlenet before placing a call to the helpdesk.
Instructors who wish to combine more than one section of students into a single Blackboard couse, upon request Middlesex Interactive can create a "Master" course site that will not be managed by IDM and can serve as a location for course material development and a repository for content.
In courses with multiple instructors, only one may be enrolled using the Blackboard designation, "Instructor" since there is only one instructor for each course listed in Banner. Additional instructors can be added using the newly created role of "Co-instructor".

This project was discussed at the FSA Technology Committee. The chair of the committee made any announcement about this project at a Spring FSA meeting.

An announcement of the changes was sent to the college community via newscaster and sent to all Blackboard instructors via Blackboard email blast.

Any questions or request for course master can be submitted to distance_ed@middlesex.mass.edu

NANC

Discussion Board: Save vs. Submit

2009-08-13T18:20:00Z

Attention:
You may want to give some Discussion Board instruction in your course sites for the use of your students. It has come to my attention several times that students don't connect the difference between Save and Submit at the bottom of a Discussion message form. When they perform the +Thread or Reply functions they get the form to type in a subject and a message when they have completed that task they have 3 buttons at the bottom of the page; Cancel, Save, & Submit. Often times I think that they connect this with saving documents and other things on their own computer; such is not the case with a Discussion Board posting in Blackboard.

When they elect Save instead of Submit the discussion board saves a copy of the posting that they have been working on as a draft. This is a good thing if the student needs to go back and make changes or edit the piece after consideration. This draft however is only accessible to the student (not even an administrator can access it). Using Submit is the only way that the posting becomes available to the instructor and the remaining members of the class. I have made a brief video demonstration that may help. Please feel free to copy the link.

Discussion Board

Nancy

Issue with Blackboard Quiz Timer

2009-07-17T16:49:00Z

There is a known issue taking quizzes through Blackboard using MS Internet Explorer 8 which is a relatively new (more than a year) browser. It seems that if you set a timer for a quiz that the elapsed time counter that shows up when the students take it covers over the Submit button which is obviously somewhat problematic if they want to take the test. Internet Explorer 8 is not fully approved for use with Blackboard to begin with so it is not something we recommend. If it is being used these are the steps to fix this particular issue.

There is a simple fix that you will be required to do when you take BB tests. There is a compatibility issue that can be fixed with a simple click of an icon between the address window and the refresh icon in the browser:

· In case no compatibility icon appears there is an adjustment that can be made to IE 8 to help BB work.

o In Internet Explorer 8 locate the Tools Menu and select Compatibility View Settings

o Add the Middlesex site (‘middlesex.mass.edu’ without quotes) in the ‘Add this website’ box

o Click Add

o You can then close the box and open the assessment

Again the upgrade to version 8 for this browser is not recommended.

NANC

Word 2007 documents

2009-07-16T17:51:00Z

It has come to my attention that occasionally when Office 2007 documents are uploaded for attachment in Blackboard that they are being converted into zip files which becomes unusable to anyone else trying to access it. This issue is not seem to be a Blackboard problem but an Office 2007 document. The problems seem to be somewhat random and solutions are less than clear. After some research on the web here are a couple of suggestions -

The quickest and simplest solution is to save the material in the 97 - 2003 option that is available in all of the Office 2007 programs. This is the BB supported solution.
Some folks are zipping the files before uploading them to BB
Some are suggesting downloading the files and renaming them with the original file extensions.
Some are also suggesting that it is an issue of not having a compatibility pack from Microsoft. This however is less likely

In the meantime there are other file formats that can be uploaded to BB without a problem. As stated above you can save as the 97 - 2003 version in any Office 2007 application, RTF (Rich Text Format), and PDF files will load for you just fine and download for your students in the proper way. Rich Text is a sort of the universal word process file that any one can open. PDF are also widely recognized file format that needs the Adode Reader to open it; this reader is common on most computers. If you are using Office 2007 you can create a PDF version of your documents within the applications by downloading and installing a plug in from Microsoft. PDF's can also be created at the following website:

NANC

Course Preparation

2009-07-13T13:28:00Z

The beginning of the term is approaching alot more rapidly than any of us would like to recognize. As you prepare your courses for the fall term you might want to conduct a little house cleaning before your site goes live for your students.

First do you have buttons on your site with no related materials? Now don't laugh or say "who me" I have seen them out there. You can keep them just disable them until you have related materials to go with them. Go to the Control Panel> Course Options> Manage Course Menu> select the menu entry with no material and click the Modify button to the right of the item> uncheck "Available for Student/Participant users". This will keep the button around if you want to use it later but the students won't be clicking on it and finding nothing.

Please be sure that all your external links work, and no you don't have to click through the BB site to find each one. In the Control Panel locate Course Tools and then click Link Checker. You will not really need to do anything the check will start automatically. When it is completed (which may take time depending on how many you have) it will display the title of the link (what you named it in BB), the web address, where it is in the course, if a link is visible or hidden, MOST important if the link is valid (Does it work or not), and then there is a box you can check to hide the link temporarily if it needs fixing. There is nothing more frustrating than trying to access online materials that don't work.

NANC

Housekeeping and Cleanup

2009-05-14T15:57:00Z

As the semester draws to a close and you have given your exams, read all the papers, and submitted all your grades what you will want to do is make your course unavailable for student access. To do this take the following steps -

Control Panel
Course Options
Settings
Course Availability
Yes (students see the course) No (students do NOT see the course) >Submit

If you need to leave the course open for students continuing to work that's fine. Just be aware that it may be shut down by some one that is just trying to take care of business and you can open it back up again with this procedure.

Nancy

Resist the Temptation

2008-10-21T18:56:00Z

As you may or may not know there are a couple of new browsers out there to try. Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8. My suggestion is that if you use Blackboard and it functions well enough for you please resist the urge to try something new. Blackboard is always a little bit behind the curve when they try to certify that their product works with new browsers.

Resistance may be futile but please try!

NANC

Uploading Documents to Blackboard through Mozilla Firefox 3.0

2008-09-29T16:47:00Z

It has come to our attention that Mozilla Firefox 3.0 and Blackboard are having compatibility issues causing an error with uploading documents. We have found a workaround to solve this problem. It will require you to install a Firefox add-on, User Agent Switcher 0.6.11.: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/59.

Once you have the add-on installed, go ahead and take a look in your Tools menu. You will see a new entry, "User Agent Switcher." Select Tools->User Agent Switcher->Options->Options... Now choose User Agents then Add.

Make the description "Blackboard" and the user agent "mac."

Nancy & Sanford

Signing in again, again, and yet again

2008-08-31T15:42:00Z

If you are not aware MCC used to use a portal provided by Blackboard. The college has decided to change portals, so this past summer when the contract for the portal with BB expired the college created a temporary portal which looks identical to the naked eye except that you have to log in to every single course in which you use BB. I know that this will cause a great deal of frustration for those of you who use BB for most courses that you teach.

My recommendation to circumvent this situation is to try and use one of two browsers.

Internet Explorer 7
Mozilla Firefox

These browsers have tabs which means you can keep several sites open in one window.

Here is a demonstration of how to do that using IE 7