Blackboard: Safe Assign unavailable 7-11pm 19 March 2015
On Thursday 19 March the SafeAssign servers in the US will undergo maintenance. During this time SafeAssign will be unavailable, submissions to SafeAssign will not be processed and reports will be delayed. If you try to access SafeAssign during this timeframe you will see an error.
This work is being completed by Blackboard and is outside of ITS’s control.
Please contact the ITS Service Desk (its.servicedesk@otago.ac.nz) if you have any questions regarding this outage.
SafeAssign Tip for Mac users
A few members of staff have contacted the HelpDesk over the last semester with problems uploading zip files of assignments to SafeAssign. After some investigation, we’ve concluded that the problems are due to a combination of at least one slightly corrupt file in the package, AND the fact that they’re being zipped up on a Mac. We know that other Mac users have had no problems at all, and we also know that if you zip the same problematic files up on Windows, you don’t get this problem.
There are basically two approaches to fixing the issue. The first one is to (by a process of elimination) figure out which file is causing the problem, open it up in an appropriate application (Word if it’s a .doc, Preview if it’s a .pdf, etc) and re-save it. This is a good solution in theory, but it can take a long time to find out which file – and there may be more than one – is causing the problem.
The second approach is to use something else to zip it up, rather than the built-in Mac OS zip application. We recommend a freeware app called “Yemuzip”, which you can either grab from Mac Support (file – connect to server – enter “mac-support” in the address and hit enter), or from the Yemuzip website. Just install the application, then double click it to open and drag all of your assignments onto the window to zip them up. By default, it will zip them up as a “PC Compatible” file – you’ll see this specified after you’ve dropped your files in. After that, you should be able to upload your new zip file with no problems.
YemuZip
Resources:
Anti-plagiarism information for Students
In their enrolment packs this year, students have been given a Plagiarism information card. The card advises students that we are using a plagiarism detection software tool (Safeassign, available in all Blackboard papers). It also gives them the address of the Plagiarism information site, which includes:
- what plagiarism is
- how best to avoid plagiarising
- how to reference material of others when used in an assignment.
The address for the information page is: http://www.otago.ac.nz/study/plagiarism
You might like to include this link in your Blackboard paper, or course book, or other website that you use to support the teaching of your paper.
