From: Walter Milligan <milligan@mtu.edu>
Subject: Important Blackboard Update
Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2008 17:20:17 -0400
To: acadforum-l@mtu.edu

Chairs and Deans,

Please forward this to your faculty and
instructional staff.

thanks
walt

--
Walter W. Milligan
Chief Information Officer
Professor, Materials Science and Engineering
Michigan Technological University
Houghton, MI  49931
(906) 487-2015, milligan@mtu.edu
www.mtu.edu/oit

Important Blackboard Update

Summer and Fall 2008 courses will be created
over the weekend, and should be available
in Blackboard early next week.  In response to faculty
feedback,  several enhancements will be made compared
to this year.  The enhancements are discussed below,
after a cautionary note about importing earlier
courses to build your course.

An unfortunate shortcoming of Blackboard CE
is that when faculty "build" new courses by
"importing" older courses, the entire "new"
course is overwritten, including the grade book.
We have enhanced the grade book in response
to faculty feedback, as discussed below. As
an example, we have added a column named
"status" that will be populated with "1st year"
for students that need mid-term grades or
"audit" for auditors.  The Status column will be
directly next to the Mid-Term grade column, so
you will easily see which students need mid-term
grades.    If you import a course from
this semester or earlier, that column and data
will be lost!

This is actually considered a "feature", since
faculty can copy grade book calculations and
columns from a previous course if the setup is
not changing.

Based on extensive feedback, we believe that the new
template is the best compromise for the most faculty, and do
not plan to change it again.  For this reason, we are
recommending that faculty import content on an item-by-item
basis instead of importing an entire course.  After this semester,
you will be able to import entire courses built in
Summer 2008 or later without losing important grade
book data.   If you absolutely must import a course,
contact us at courses@mtu.edu and we can add the
columns and data after import.   Tell us the course
number (along with CRN and instructor) that needs to
be updated.

Key enhancements include:

1.  Classes will only be created in Blackboard
if there are students enrolled.   If students enroll
late, the course will automatically be created
when the first student enrolls.

2.  Fall courses will be available in April.

3.  Students are loaded into the grade book
within 2 days of creation of the Blackboard
course.  M-numbers are loaded with the initial
student data.

4.  The "status" column mentioned above is created
in the grade book, which clearly identifies students
who are auditing and those who require mid-term
grades.  As-published, the Status column will be
directly next to the Mid-Term grade column and one
column away from the Final grade column.

5.  Student major, year, and whether or not they
have requested a privacy flag will be in the
grade book (in the "View All" field, not in the
"Grades" field.)

6. Students will be able to access their courses
a week prior to the start of the term.

We appreciate your patience during this learning
process for all of us.