All courses for spring 2013 have been created in Blackboard. Now they are available to you via myUT or this link https://blackboard.utdl.edu

The course shell for spring 2013 includes the following items on the left course menu:

• Start Here: This is a blank area in which you can place your course orientation materials to help your students get started with this course.
• Course News: The area contains four basic modules (Announcements, Calendar, To Do, and What’s New) that give information to users based on their enrollment and their role in the system. Students can navigate to individual items to take action.
• Public Area: This is the public area of your course. Any person throughout the world can access this area of your course site as a ‘Guest’ user! You can place your course syllabus and/or any other course information in this content area to share with prospective students and others interested in your course. Please ensure that the materials you post to this content area do not violate any copyright or privacy laws. For more information about the public area please watch the video tutorials on the Faculty Resources page.
• Learner Support: This area contains critical information about Online Learning tech support, Office of Accessibility, eLibrary services, eTutroing services, as well as browser requirements check and Blackboard video tutorials.
• Instructor Support: This area is only visible to instructors and it contains a list of tutorials on how to use Blackboard tools and other resources such as templates and quality matters standards.

Should you have any questions or need assistance feel free to contact UTLV@utoledo.edu or call 419 530 8835.

Instructional designers hold office hours in the Memorial Field House, Monday through Thursday this fall. Online instructors are welcome to stop by for an instructional design consultation or schedule an appointment with them to discuss Best Practices for online and blended learning courses.

Please visit LV blog for more tips and events throughout the semester at http://wordpress.utoledo.edu/learningventures/Check that site often–and subscribe to our RSS feed -http://wordpress.utoledo.edu/learningventures/feed/-to keep in touch with new developments and to be part of the discussion about excellence in online learning at UT.

Students and faculty are reporting problems with the quiz function in Blackboard 9.1. We introduced a “patch” that we think will take care of many of the issues, so if you’ve had trouble with a quiz in the last few days, consider trying it again now. However, there are a number of rules that we strongly recommend you ask your students to follow. You can publicize these rules on your course site or send students to this post.

We recommend that all BB9.1 users use the Firefox browser 3.6 (free download) when taking tests rather than Internet Explorer, Safari or other browsers. Some browsers are only “compatible” but not “certified” for use with some operating systems. You can check the optimal combination of browser and operating system at Blackboard’s help site. If a student has an operating system with no corresponding certified browser, the student should use a UT computer or the “Virtual Lab.”

Before starting your quiz or test, it is important to follow a few guidelines to better ensure that you will not experience technical problems that might cause your assessment to “lock.”

• Close all windows on the computer and then launch a new window to login to the learning management system.
• Close other applications before taking the quiz/test (including chat programs).
• If there is a specific start time for the test, login 10-15 minutes early to test the connection.
• After opening the test, scroll to the bottom of the page to be sure the save and submit buttons are available.
• Only click “Save and Submit” AFTER you have completed the exam.
• Do not use any of the browser navigation buttons (i.e. Back, Forward, Home, etc.) during the quiz/test. Only use the buttons in the quiz itself.
• Do not leave the assessment page without completing the assessment and clicking the “Save and Submit” button at the end (if it is a forced completion test).
• Do not click the Refresh or Reload buttons in your browser while taking the quiz/test.
• No other browser windows or applications should be running on your computer while taking a quiz/test. Shut everything else down before you start.
• Do not click on buttons in the Blackboard navigation while taking a quiz/test.
• If you are only able to answer one question at a time (questions present themselves on separate pages), make sure you only single-click the “Next” button to move forward.

It is recommended you take a practice test on your course site or the practice test available on LV’s “Guide to UT Online Learning” or “A Web Assisted Guide to UT Online Learning.” Be sure to use the computer that you will use to take tests.

Many of these rules apply to other kinds of “secure” web sites and are worth remembering in any event. Please contact UTLV if you have any questions or concerns about the assessment tool in BB9.1 or if you would like help with online exams.

(Tips reprinted with permission from Cape Fear CC).
(Updated 10/4/10)

If imported content from WebCT appears for instructors but not students and students get messages like “File Not Found” or “You Do Not Have Permission To Access This File” etc, then we suggest you take the following steps, and that you suggest two additional steps to your students:

• In the “Control Panel” at the bottom left of the left-pane menu, click on Files.
• Click on the course number (i.e. the “Alphanumeric.” For example, MLS 4600_5600 (since the course is cross-listed as a 4k and 5k course).
• Then, in the window labeled “Course Content:…”, click on the the Contextual Menu to the right of the WebCT imported content folder (it will say “imported content”) and select Permissions. (The “contextual menu” looks like a chevron or a double-arrow pointing downward).
• Click the Add Course User List button near the top of the screen. The button has white writing with a blue background.
• Click the check box to the left of All Course Users and click the Submit button to secure your changes.

Presto, bingo…all course users (including students) should now be able to see content imported from WebCT. If you’d like to see this actually done with a little narration from me (BP) and our senior designer, Dr. Peter You, follow this link to a screen capture: http://screencast.com/t/MTM1Mzky

If students still have problems and cannot see course content, ask them to “clear the cache” in their web browsers. Once they do, the page will load appropriately.

Our transition to Blackboard 9.1 has been compared to “wrestling bears.” Whether this comparison is favorable or unfavorable I will leave to you, and so much depends upon the size of the bear and whether it has been de-clawed, but the message was clear: it has not been easy to make the change, particularly for those of us who like to take a more “hands-on” role in course design.

As part of our regular updates about the transition, the LV Instructional Designers and I would like to address recurring issues and solutions that might help you and your students. You can help us a great deal by leaving comments below: are you frustrated with a feature or a bug (and if you can’t tell the difference, it’s probably a bug)? Is there a mystery tool that you’d like to use but know nothing about? Have your students encountered a problem? Leaving comments here will help us share knowledge and find solutions more quickly.

Some notes:

1. Phoebe Ballard sent us the following today: “If faculty choose to use the Messages tool ONLY for all course related email, they will need to disable to the Email tool for the course in Customization > Tool Availability. If they do not, students will still be able to send Blackboard generated utoledo email via the My Institutions tab.” You may have noticed that the “WebCT Email” function is called “Messages” in Blackboard, and the Blackboard “Email” tool actually integrates with UTAD and generates an email to the preferred UTAD address. Depending on how you want communication to work in your course, you may wish to disable this function following Phoebe’s instructions above.
2. If imported content from WebCT appears for instructors but not students:
   -Go to the File Manager.
   -Click on the Contextual Menu to the right of the WebCT imported content folder and select Permissions.
   -Click the Add Course User List button near the top of the screen.
   -Click the check box to the left of All Course Users and click the Submit button to secure your changes.
3. We’ve discovered that some course content displays perfectly well in one browser but not in another, and the same is true of quiz tools. We recommend that students and faculty download and use Firefox. It is more stable, faster, and seems to give us the fewest fits. If something seems to be “broken” on the site (for students or faculty), you can always try to clear the browser’s cache and try to do something over. If that doesn’t work, try another browser (Explorer, Safari (for mac or windows), or, if you’re feeling adventurous, Chrome or Opera) and see if that clears up the problem.
4. If you’ve started teaching using Blackboard, you’ve noticed that your course comes with a busy-looking “Homepage.” That is a machine generated page that provides students with notifications of new material, announcements, due dates, and reminders. It is a very good thing for students, so we strongly recommend that you leave that page displayed. You do not need to do anything to that page but simply ignore it. It is so that the students can be notified of changes and updates at a glance and will help them with time management.
5. Lance Stoll requests (or perhaps “strongly urges”) faculty who would like to have a web assisted course to use our “WA Course Request” link on the LV home page, even if you have already submitted a request. It really is the fastest way to get your course assigned.

To those of you trying Blackboard 9.1, we appreciate your patience and your willingness to work with us. We are still a few days behind in processing the hundreds of requests we’ve received over the last few days, and we are still dealing with the occasional glitch or hiccup in the marriage of Banner and Blackboard, but that’s to be expected in any marriage. Again, comments are welcome and appreciated. How has your experience been? How can we help you?

We ask that you make a final decision concerning your choice of server–Blackboard 9.1 or WebCT 4.1–no later than NOON on Saturday, August 21, 2010.

Learning Ventures is attempting to process many requests to adopt Blackboard 9.1. However, technical issues involving the integration between Banner (which contains enrollment data) and Blackboard (in which students are enrolled), as well as the sheer volume of requests, are slowing our processing. If you are already teaching a web-assisted or online course and would like to use Blackboard, please keep reading. If you have not yet asked for a web-assisted course and would like to do so, please request a web assisted course.

Below are four very important pieces of information if you are using Blackboard for your online or web-assisted course. ALL of this information and more is available on the Learning Ventures blog: http://wordpress.utoledo.edu/learningventures). To get our updates, check the “Faculty” tab in the portal for the Learning Ventures window, or better yet, include our RSS feed (http://wordpress.utoledo.edu/learningventures/feed/) in your email program or RSS feed reader. Posts on the LV site are linked to keywords or “tags” and the site is easily searched for the topic of interest to you.

Important Information:

Faculty and students will have access to both WebCT (Blackboard 4.1) and Blackboard 9.1 beginning this weekend (Saturday or Sunday, August 21 or 22). We ask that you make a final decision concerning your choice of server no later than NOON on Saturday. This is for the sake of your students so that logging on is easy and for the sake of our organization so that we can effectively assist faculty teaching online.

If you’ve been keeping up with our transition plans, you know that we are loading ALL courses onto both our old WebCT server and our new Blackboard 9.1 server. Our intention is to have every unused site contain a link to the site being used for instruction so that students cannot get lost. But we will need to know which site you are using in order to do this. You should have notified Lansing Stoll if you want to use Blackboard 9.1. Otherwise, the “default” is to WebCT. If you have notified Lance and are not yet being directed automatically to the correct server, please have patience: we are processing hundreds of requests and need time to fulfill them all.

If you are using Blackboard 9.1 and want to help prevent confusion, you can advise students to access the appropriate server. Access can be achieved in any of the following three ways:

1. Via “My Courses” on the Portal. BUT: To use this option, you will have to manually change the link directing students to the Blackboard server. To do this:

• Go to “My Courses” and look at your schedule
• Next to each course you will see a red “Edit” button
• Click the red “Edit” button.
• You will get to a window called “Set Course Homepage.” It will allow you to select the “default” homepage for your course.
• Click “WebCT-Fall”
• In the box marked “URL:”, enter the following values:
  If you intend to use WebCT, leave it unchanged! WebCT is the “default” server.
  If you intend to use Blackboard instead of WebCT, enter: http://blackboard.utdl.edu
• Click “Save Changes”
• You will be returned to the “My Courses” page where you can check the link. Once it is updated, the link will take you and your students to the appropriate server.

2. Via the UT Learning Ventures web page.

• Go to www.utoledo.edu/dl
• Just below the banner, you will see a “dropdown” menu.
• Choose the correct system from the dropdown menu and click “go”

3. Direct Link:

• If your course is in WebCT in the fall, give students this link (in an email or on paper): https://utwebct.utdl.edu:2153.
• If your course is in Blackboard in the fall, give students this link: https://blackboard.utdl.edu.

In order to avoid frustration and to accommodate the transition to our new system, Learning Ventures decided to give faculty a choice between the old and the new. Therefore, if you are teaching a web-assisted or fully online course this fall, you will have access to a course site in both Blackboard CE 4.1 (aka WebCT 4.1)and Blackboard 9.1. Here’s how to move ahead if you’d like to teach with the new system:

If you are a faculty member and you would like to use Bb 9.1 for fall, please do the following:

1. Contact Lance Stoll (lansing.stoll@utoledo.edu ) and ask him to code your course as Bb 9.1 so that your students can log into your course via the myUT portal.

2. If you would like to use a WebCT backup from a previous term, contact UTLV@utoledo.edu or if you already work with an instructional designer, contact that designer directly. In your message, indicate the course number, section number, and semester of the backup you would like to use. You may also build your course from scratch.

3. Before Friday, August 20, email your students via the myUT portal and tell them that you will be using Bb 9.1 for fall (see the attached file).

4. To learn more about Bb 9.1 features and tools, attend our workshops or review our online guides. All training sessions and workshops will be “BB9.1″ oriented, though we will continue to offer online resources and staff assistance in WebCT.

5. If you have any questions, contact UTLV@utoledo.edu, call LV Support (530-8835), or drop us a message through the chat window on our main page (utoledo.edu/dl). ;

Once you’ve taken the plunge into BB9.1 (and there are many advantages to doing this), UTLV will do the following:

· Post a message in the course site that you will not be using (either Bb 9.1 or WebCT). This message will direct students to the correct login screen.
· Load students into the Guide to UT Online Learning approximately two weeks before the start of the term.
· Load students into both WebCT and Blackboard sites on Friday, August 20.
· Provide Bb 9.1 workshops for students in FH 2010.

Please contact LV if you have any questions, and check back often for updates and suggestions. This site is searchable, so if you click on the appropriate “tag” or use the search window and type in “blackboard” or “9.1,” you’ll get a full list of all our postings on that topic.

At the close of the Spring 10 semester, it is of paramount importance that you back-up your course and download a copy of it to your local drive for future reference. For detailed instructions regarding backing up and downloading your course please visit: http://www.utoledo.edu/dl/HTML/backup.htm and http://www.utoledo.edu/dl/HTML/download_backup.htm If you need assistance please call 419 530 8835 or email UTLV@utoledo.edu. LV staff will be glad to show you how to backup and download your course.

As the Summer term will start on May 17, you may want to restore a course from a previous backup if you do not want to build the course from scratch. Please follow the directions to restore (http://www.utoledo.edu/dl/HTML/restore.htm) and reset (http://www.utoledo.edu/dl/HTML/reset.htm) your course. If you need assistance please call 419 530 8835 or email UTLV@utoledo.edu, LV staff will be glad to show you how to restore your course.

As always, please give LV a call if you would like to enhance your online or blended/web-assisted course. If you would like to create multimedia components, interactive learning activities or discuss best practices of integrating technologies into your online courses please contact LV and we will make sure you are connected with an instructional designer who can help create an outstanding learning environment for your students.