Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Make Your Old Courses Unavailable Before Copying to New Courses

There's a quirk in the new version of Blackboard. When you do a course copy, Bb copies the course availability settings from your old course to the new course. If your old course is available to students, this would make your new course available before you're ready for students to view it.

 In a perfect world, you have already made all your old courses unavailable, but just in case you haven't, please do so before copying Bb containers for the upcoming semester. Instructions for making your courses unavailable can be found at
http://www.gcccd.edu/online/tutorials/bb/course-availability-9.pdf.

A word of caution. You may be tempted to avoid this problem by not copying course settings, but this is one of the most important areas to copy, so please make sure course settings is checked when you do a course copy.

Thursday, July 7, 2011

MS Office 2010 Accessibility Checker

Please follow these directions to make your files accessible to those with disabilities before you do your final save in Microsoft Office 2010. This is just a reminder that making files accessible is not only a good thing to do, we are required to do so by law.
  1. Click the File tab.
  2. Click Info.
  3. Under Prepare for Sharing, an alert will appear if the Accessibility Checker has found any problems.
  4. If there is an alert, click the Check for Issues button, then click Check Accessibility.

  5. You are returned to your file where the Accessibility Checker task pane is open, showing the inspection results.
  6. Click on a specific issue to see Additional Information and steps you can take to fix or revise the content.

    Note:   If the content in the additional information pane in the bottom of the Accessibility Checker is hard to scroll because you can't use the mouse, press F6 to focus on the task pane, tab until the focus is in that area, and then try to scroll with the keyboard.