We’re now two weeks out from the Blackboard Upgrade, so at the moment we’re doing new feature demonstrations, and making the final arrangements about which papers we will be taking over to the “new” Blackboard. We’re also sorting out which papers we need to host on a temporary server during the outage, as some papers continue teaching after the end of the semester – and some start really early! While you’re winding down for Christmas, ITS will be hard at work setting up our brand new Blackboard installation, and carefully moving papers across to it.
Information about the upgrade has been posted on the Blackboard Upgrade Blog, and also sent to departments as flyers, included in the ITS Update, emailed to all staff who use Blackboard, and sent out on the All Departments email list. So by now, we hope that everyone is aware of what we’re doing. For the final two weeks though, here’s some things that you might like to make sure you’ve taken care of:
- Statistics – if you have been collecting statistics throughout the year about your paper now is a good time to export all this data as it will not be moved to the new system.
- Digital Dropbox – because the new version of Blackboard does not have a Digital Dropbox all files that are currently in the Digital Dropbox will be lost in cyberspace after the move.
- Grades – you can download Excel copies of your Grade Center from within the Grade Center. Grades will remain if your paper is being taught during the outage.
Now is also a good time to have a bit of a spring clean in your course – if there are old files in there you don’t want there next year clear them out.
For more information about the new version of Blackbaord, head on over to the Blackboard Upgrade Blog.
