Information Technology Services at UNC-Chapel Hill

Version 2 of bFree, the Blackboard Course Extractor, now available.

October 3, 2007 | In How-To , Helper Software

The popular bFree application has been revised to extract far more material from a Blackboard course archive, and to make your exploration and use of that material easier.

The program now extracts Announcements; Discussion Board entries, archives, and attachments; Digital Drop Box and File Exchange uploads. It continues to extract wiki entries and attachments, Staff Information and attachments, and Content Area pages, including folders, descriptions, links, and attached files of all kinds. Note that Tests, Gradebook, Surveys, Assignments, Pools are among the content not yet supported.

bFree will quickly create an independent web site that mimics the structure of the original Blackboard course. The site can be placed on a web server or CD, or even loaded into other Learning Management Systems like Sakai.

The interface now displays previews along with the course outline, and provides a larger area for previews. All texts, titles, names, and descriptions can be searched to locate materials of interest. All the features of bFree are documented within bFree itself.

bFree is available, free of charge, at: http://its.unc.edu/tl/tli/bFree/

A document detailing version changes is here: http://its.unc.edu/tl/tli/bFree/bFreeChanges.rtf

(The bFree application is © Copyright 2006-2007 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.) This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.

Your suggestions and comments are welcome; send them to David_Moffat@unc.edu.)

Old Blackboard Sites Scheduled For Deletion.

October 1, 2007 | In Service Notices , Upgrade/Maintenance Period As part of the yearly maintenance of the UNC-CH Blackboard system, this fall ITS will delete:

• Old Blackboard sites created for courses listed with the University Registrar for the semesters prior to Fall 2005, and

• Blackboard sites created by request before August 2005 for either teaching or non-teaching purposes.

Blackboard sites available to students as of September 25, 2007 will not be targeted for deletion even if created within the timeframes mentioned above. Actions: 1) Go to the old sites targeted for deletion checker to see the list of your old sites targeted for deletion. 2) If there are sites in that list that should *not* be deleted, use the deletion checker to submit site exemptions. The deadline to submit site exemptions is Wednesday, November 14, 2007. 3) Make your own backup copy of a Blackboard site if you wish to keep a local copy of any of the sites targeted for deletion. Note that, once old sites are deleted they will no longer be available to users and it will not be possible to fulfill site restoration requests.