Wrapping It Up and Starting All Over Again

Here are a few things you will want to keep in mind as you wrap up the fall semester and prepare for the spring semester.

Wrapping It Up

• Backup your course
• Make your course unavailable

Starting All Over Again

Something to consider for the new year is to review your courses to see what you could do to improve them.  The Online Teaching and Learning Committee (OTLC) has created a document to help you with this process called the "Guidelines for Effective Online Instruction."  Take a look at it and see how well your courses meet these guidelines.

I'm Moving and On Vacation

I will be moving to my new office on Friday, 12/17.  My new office is in Room C-118.  To find me, take a left once you're inside the library and go through the glass doors.  I'm in the last office on the left.  

I'll be on vacation from 12/20/10 - 1/2/11.  If you want to work with me before the spring semester, please find a time that works for you on my schedule. I am not available for appointments during Flex Week because I am teaching so many workshops during that time, so please plan ahead.

I wish you all a very happy holiday season and winter recess!

Prezi - The Coolest Presentation Tool

According to Robin Wauters blog post, "Prezi is the coolest online presentation tool I've ever seen."  I think many of you will agree with Robin after you see this tool in action.  If you're tired of PowerPoint and looking for new ways to present material, give Prezi a try.

If you decide to sign up, be sure to use the educational license page to get a free upgrade to the Enjoy version, or reduced price of $59/year on the Pro version (a $100/year savings).

Just keep in mind that since Prezi creates Flash files that are not accessible, these should be used in the classroom only.

SafeAssign Delays

This information came from Blackboard today:

On Tuesday, November 2nd, papers submitted to SafeAssign were not being processed. The outage was caused by a storage failure related to continued high submission volume. It took some time to identify the cause, but thereafter service was quickly resolved. As part of the resolution, we have added storage capacity to be more reliable and robust. We believe the system is stabilized and papers are now being processed. There remains a backlog of papers that are queued for processing; this will occur over the next few days and we expect the system to be completely caught up by November 9th.

We apologize for this inconvenience. Our teams are working diligently to monitor the situation and correct any further problems.

Saving Time in the Online Class

CenterPoint is an online video magazine for online teachers. Each quarter CenterPoint publishes a new video covering topics of interest to faculty teaching online. This episode includes "Saving Time in the Online Class." They suggest collecting the emails from your students for a semester, then compiling them into an FAQ to post the next semester to save you the time it takes to answer the same questions over and over. 

Of course we all know, getting the students to read the FAQ is another topic altogether!  You may want to incorporate the information into your syllabus or into the assignment that generates the question.

Here's the link to watch the CenterPoint video in case the link above doesn't work:
http://www.regent.edu/admin/ctl/onlinetraining/centerpoint/home.htm

Camtasia Captions Just Got Easier

Camtasia is screen recording and video editing software that many faculty use to enhance teaching and learning. This week a new version of Camtasia came out.  The biggest change in this version is enhanced ways captions can be added to videos. They even added text-to-speech capability from within the program. Check out a video showing how it works at http://www.techsmith.com/learn/camtasia/7/captions-overview/

SafeAssign Slowdowns

Blackboard sent us the following message about SafeAssign performance issues. If you get an error when trying to access SafeAssign, wait 10 - 30 minutes and try again.

"This message is to notify our clients of two intermittent SafeAssign issues due to an increase in volume of papers processed.

Extended time to receive submission results. Typically papers submitted into SafeAssign take a few minutes to process. However, during this peak season there have been multiple occurrences of SafeAssign paper submissions building up in queue. This causes a lag in processing time. While the papers are processed successfully, it can take several minutes up to 2 to 3 hours, due to the current high volume. Note that any papers that accumulate in the queue are processed and do not need to be re-submitted.

Intermittent errors when submitting papers or accessing submissions. Occasionally when a student attempts to submit a SafeAssign paper or an instructor attempts to access a SafeAssign submission,rather than processing the paper or accessing the paper, the user receives an error message. This error signifies that one of the SafeAssign servers is unresponsive due to load. Our team is automatically notified when this occurs and takes immediate action to restart the services, which typically is accomplished in a matter of minutes. Submissions that result in an error need to be re-submitted.

Peak utilization of our SafeAssign product typically occurs during the months of October and November. While we made adjustments to our environment to prepare for this high volume season, we’ve seen a 60% increase in submissions over last year. Therefore, we are currently working to address this additional usage in our SafeAssign environment. We will send a follow up bulletin within the month to share our progress."

New Video for Students - "How to Submit an Assignment"

An instructional video on "How to Submit an Assignment" was created so that faculty can provide the link to their students.

If you were linking to the old video, please update the link to the new one at
 http://www.gcccd.edu/online/tutorials/bb/videos/submit-assignment/

Pasting from Word into Blackboard

When you copy from a Word document and paste it into Blackboard, all kinds of havoc can result.  Word has a lot of code sitting behind the text that you see that can interfere with Blackboard's code.  There are a few ways to get around this.

1.  Before pasting into Blackboard, click the < > icon in the Bb Editor toolbar to switch to HTML mode, then paste.  You can then click the < > icon again and go back to the normal editing mode and do your formatting.

• Advantages: easy and convenient
• Disadvantages: it strips out everything, including carriage returns

2.  Copy from Word, then paste into Wordpad or Notepad.  Copy from Wordpad or Notepad, then paste into Blackboard

• Advantages: leaves in carriage returns
• Disadvantages: have to open another program, and copy twice

3.  Use PureText's Windows key - v to paste into Bb instead of Ctrl - v.

• Advantages: leaves in carriage returns, just a keystroke to make it work
• Disadvantages: none (except all formatting is lost, which will happen no matter what method is chosen)

PureText is a free program that you can install from http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/ that will strip Word's destructive codes before you paste into Blackboard.  You can then do all your formatting within Blackboard.  

To install PureText:

1. Install the program.  See a video showing how to download using Internet Explorer, or follow these instructions:
1. Go to http://www.stevemiller.net/puretext/ and click the link at the bottom of the page.  This will download a zip file.  
2. Extract the zip file using Windows Explorer.  
3. Run the PureText.exe file to start the program.  This will show a black PT icon in your system tray.
2. Right-click the PT icon in the system tray and choose options
3. In the options dialog, you can change the key combination that will paste the cleaned up text, although that's not necessary.  Windows-v is easy to remember because it's close to Ctrl-v
4. In the options dialog, put a check next to "Automatically run PureText each time I log on to Windows.  This will make sure it's ready to work whenever you want to paste clean text from Word.  If you don't want it to run every time you start windows, locate the .exe file using Windows Explorer and send it to your desktop as a shortcut..

How to See a List of Students in Your Course

One thing that is not very intuitive in Blackboard 9 is how to see a list of your students.  It's clear some programmer and not an instructor thought of these terms.

You can list your students by

1. Select Control Panel > Users and Groups > Users
2. In the two search dropdowns, choose Username for the first one and Not Blank for the second one
3. Click Go.

@ONE Courses

@ONE offers free online workshops and low cost online courses relevant to online teachers.  See the full list of course offerings at cccone.org.

Software For Home

A new order form is available that allows you to purchase either Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 for $19 at http://www.gcccd.edu/faculty.staff/ .  The link is about half way down the text of the page and says "Office 2010 Form."  


You do not have to purchase SharePoint Designer 2007 for home.  Microsoft allows you to download it free from http://tinyurl.com/cz22uy.  The SharePoint Designer offered on that form is only there in case you want a disk for the program, you can pay $19.


This software is for use on your home computers only.  A date for updating campus computers to Office 2010 has not been determined yet, so please do not use the disks you purchase to update your office PC.

Announcements Will Send Emails Now!

The bug that was preventing emails from being sent when an announcement is posted has been fixed.

In Blackboard 9, the text of your announcement is no longer sent.  Students will be given a link to the announcement and they'll have to log in to Blackboard to read it.

There are two more posts from me today, so be sure to keep reading.

Safari version 5 on the Mac will not work with Blackboard

Before even getting to the login page in Blackboard, Safari 5 users may think Blackboard is down because they see this error message.  This has been verified only on Mac computers; PC's do not get this error.  Please have any students experiencing this problem use Firefox instead.

Here is Blackboard's list of compatible browsers:
http://kb.blackboard.com/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=56821440

Comments Not Showing for Assignments and SafeAssignments

When your students view their grades for regular Assignments or SafeAssignments, they cannot see your comments in the Comments column within My Grades. However, the student will see the comment if they click on the score for the assignment.  Please explain to your students how to see your comments.

This problem is slated to be fixed in a future release of Blackboard.

Online Teaching and Learning Committee Needs YOU!

We need four full-time faculty members on the Online Teaching and Learning Committee (OTLC).  The OTLC currently meets on the second Friday of the month from 10 am to noon, however we are open to changing this meeting time to best meet our members' needs.  This is a great group of people, and if you teach online, it's an excellent opportunity to contribute to Cuyamaca College's online teaching directions and focus.  Please contact Jodi Reed  for more information.

OTLC is a sub-committee of the Instructional Technology Council (ITC).  You can find out information about the OTLC charge in the current Organizational & Governance Structures Handbook.

My Tasks Error Workaround

According to Blackboard, this error occurs when copying a course without copying the settings. This will not be fixed permanently until we upgrade to version 9.1, which I don't believe will happen until perhaps sometime next year. In the meantime, we have a manual workaround for this error.

Please try the following steps to reset the announcements and tasks that are causing the error.

1. Show all your courses and announcements in the My Courses module
   
   1. Click the gear icon in the upper right corner of the My Courses module on the Welcome page
   2. Place a check mark for every class in the Display Course ID and Display Announcements columns
   3. Click Submit
2. When you are returned to the Welcome page, hopefully not all of your courses will show in the My Courses module. The last course listed should be the course that is causing the error. You will need to go into that course and access Announcements and Tasks to clear it.
   
   1. Click the last course that shows in the My Courses module
   2. In the Control Panel expand Course Tools
   3. Click Announcements and wait for the page to refresh
   4. Click Tasks and wait for the page to refresh
3. Click the Welcome tab to return to the Welcome page. Hopefully all your courses will display now and the red error message will be gone.  If this worked, you can use the gear icon again to uncheck the courses you don't want to display anymore.  Having the Display Announcements column checked should no longer cause only a partial list of your courses to display, so you can choose whether you want those checked or not.

I have seen one case where the course that was causing the problem was not the last in the list, but was in the middle of the list. The only way we found this was to follow the steps above for every course until we hit the one causing the error. That seems to be a rare situation though.

I am working hard to convince Bb to give us a better fix for this if you want to wait to see if that happens, but I wanted to get this information out to those of you that are willing to go through these steps to fix the problem. When you fix the problem for your courses, your students will no longer see the error message.

Show the Menu in Blackboard

Sometimes the course menu just disappears in Blackboard 9.  When this happens, students can become confused about how to get the menu to show again.  I made a video to show students how to show the menu again so that you can give them the link to help them out.  Feel free to share this link as needed.

Here is the link:

http://www.cuyamaca.edu/rhonda.bauerlein/bb/show-menus/show-menus.html

How to Hide Students in the Bb Grade Center

When students drop your class they remain visible in Blackboard. This is to protect student work that would otherwise be completely lost if a student was accidentally dropped for any reason. However, having all those extra names in your Grade Center can be distracting or even frustrating. Fortunately, there are two ways to hide students in the Blackboard Grade Center.

Method One
This method is best when you only have a few students to hide.  It will not work in some versions of Firefox until that is fixed by Bb.

• Go to the Grade Center (Control Panel > Evaluation > Grade Center)
• Click the chevron next to a student's name
• Click Hide User

Method Two
This method is best when you have several students to hide.

• Go to the Grade Center (Control Panel > Evaluation > Grade Center)
• Hover over the blue Manage button
• Click Student Visibility
• Put a check mark next to each of the students you wish to hide
• Click the light blue Hide Users button
• The students you selected will now show Hidden in the status column
• Click Submit to keep your changes

How to Embed YouTube Video Into Blackboard

Here is something a little more fun than my recent posts to give us a change of pace for the weekend.

How to Embed YouTube Video Into Blackboard

1. Go to the YouTube page of the video you want to post
2. Click the Embed button
   
3. Uncheck Include Related Videos (or your students will go watch other videos!), then copy the code that appears on the YouTube page
   
   
   
4. In the Bb Visual Editor click the < > icon in to switch to HTML view
   
   
   
5. Press a Ctrl-v to paste in your code
   
6. Click Submit
   

Blackboard Browser Wars

Overall, Firefox tends to be a faster and more reliable browser to use for Blackboard than IE. However, we are seeing a problem with hiding users in Firefox that works okay in IE. In the Grade Center, when you click the chevron next to a student's name, then click Hide User the student will be hidden in IE, but not in Firefox. To work around this in Firefox you can hover over the Manage button, then click Student Visibility and hide your students there. This bug isn't slated to be fixed until version 9.2, so it will be quite a while before it gets fixed. We're currently on version 9.0 SP4.

We've seen cases where the scroll bars in the Grade Center weren't showing in IE 8, so those using IE 8 may want to try using Firefox instead. This bug will be fixed in the next Service Pack (SP5) update.

Another bug challenge we're seeing is the Mark as Read button doesn't work in the discussion board when using IE. This does work in Firefox. Grading discussion boards is faster in Firefox, so you may want to switch just for that reason.

You might want to suggest that your students use a different browser anytime they're having problems with Blackboard as the first possible solution.  This very often fixes problems.  Here is a list of the most compatible browsers for Blackboard that you can give your students.