Brief service interruption between 6 and 6:20 AM on Friday October 17, 2008.

During this time ITS will be upgrading the firmware on the router that connects the switches in and provides routing for the ITS-Manning machine room. This maintenance will result in network communication interruptions of approximately 20 minutes for systems at that location, including https://blackboard.unc.edu.

Service downtime scheduled for Thursday, October 16, 2008 from 6 AM to 12 noon.

During this time ITS will apply a fix for a Blackboard 6.3 bug that causes duplications of some Gradebook related items when copying or importing courses.

Although we have not received reports from users of any problems related to this bug, according to Blackboard this bug could potentially lead to a variety of issues:

1. Duplicate Gradebook categories.
2. Weights by category does not function.
3. Duplicates in Total and Weighted Total columns in the database leading to:
   • total scores in student grade view appearing twice as high as they should be
   • instructors inability to hide these from student view
   • instructors inability to control whether the total appears as running total or not to students

After the fix is applied and while the system is still unavailable to user, ITS will carry out extensive testing in an attempt to safeguard the integrity of Gradebook data in the courses affected.

Upcoming Blackboard Workshops for October 2008

Blackboard: Introduction for Beginners - An Introduction to Blackboard for Beginners.

Blackboard: Introduction to the Blackboard Gradebook - This hands-on workshop will cover: how to add items to the Gradebook; how to display grades; how to weight grades and restore the grade book to un-weight grades; where to find statistics and details for each Gradebook item; how to download and upload the Gradebook.

Blackboard: Students’ Work Collection Tools. Learn how to use Blackboard’s Digital Dropbox, the Assignment Tool and the Teams LX (wiki tool).

Blackboard: Test and Quizzes - Learn how to create test and quizzes.

Registration is open! Register now!

The Blackboard maintenance scheduled for Monday, August 18, 2008, from 6 AM to 6:30 AM, has been completed successfully.

All users should now be able to log into https://blackboard.unc.edu with no problem.

Upcoming Blackboard Workshop for August 18, 2008.

Blackboard: Students’ Work Collection Tools. Learn how to use Blackboard’s Digital Dropbox, the Assignment Tool and the Teams LX.

Registration is open! Register now!