Change the Time Blackboard Assignments and Tests Are Due

If you have Blackboard tests and assignments that are due at 11:55 pm or 11:59 pm, please consider changing the due and availability times to 11:00 pm or earlier. 

Blackboard periodically needs to take their servers down for maintenance or emergency repair and they usually do this at 11 pm. If your assignments are due later than 11 pm, some students may find it difficult to submit their tests and papers. We try to give enough notice through Blackboard announcements prior to any maintenance, but I know how easy it is for both students and faculty to just skip past these announcements to go to the course they want to work on.

Changing the due and availability times to 11 pm will make it less disruptive for students when Blackboard maintenance is performed. The Date Management tool is a great way to do this for many assignments and tests all in one place. Just select "List all dates for review" to get started.

Please remember to change the time assignments are due on September 4th to 11 pm because we will definitely be down for about 4 hours that night to do a minor Blackboard update.

Two Snapshot Runs Per Day

District IS listened to our request from last semester and they are now running Snapshot twice per day to transfer information from WebAdvisor to Blackboard.  Below is the new schedule.

A quick summary is:

• If a student enrolls between 1:00am and 11:45am today, they will have access to Blackboard about 4:30pm today
  
• If a student enrolls between 11:45am today and 1:00am tomorrow, they will have access to Blackboard about 7:30am tomorrow

	1st Run	2nd Run
IS data process starts	1:00am	11:45am
Data files on ftp server (times will vary according to length of process)	2:30am	1:30pm
Blackboard picks up files	4:45am	1:45pm
Blackboard starts Snapshot process	5:00am	2:00pm
Snapshot updates completed (times will vary according to number of updates)	7:30am	4:30pm
Updates the data entered between	11:45am previous day- 1:00am current day	1:00am-11:45am current day

Note: If the previous Snapshot process is still running, the next one will be aborted

Thanks go to Brian Nath and Debbi Smith for implementing this so our students can access their online classes sooner after adding!