What’s New in Blackboard at EOU

Announcing Version 7.1 Enterprise Edition!

Fall 2006

This version will give us much more stability, speed, and functionality. It will be operational for fall term 2006 classes. Please read these important notes about this new version:

• Course shells have been automatically created for every EOU course for Fall and Winter terms. Students will be automatically enrolled in the courses approximately 2 weeks before classes start. All information regarding courses, instructors, and students in those courses will be maintained in and updated from the Banner Student Information System. If there are missing courses or instructors, please correct the information in Banner first. Courses are created "unavailable." That is, faculty can see and work with them, but students cannot unless and until the instructor makes them available. If you choose not to use Blackboard, your students will not see the course in their listing. If you do, be sure to make each course available when you're ready for students to use it.

• The official web address (URL) for this new version of Blackboard is http://blackboard1.eou.edu. Links and bookmarks to http://blackboard.eou.edu and http://webclass.eou.edu will also take you to the new server. To get to the old server, you will need to go to http://blue.eou.edu specifically. (There is also a link to this server on the home page of the new Blackboard.) No new courses will be created on the old server.

• New user accounts were created on the new server, including a new password. Your user name should be the same as your previous one, which is the same as your e-mail account name. Your password, however, may be
  different. For faculty and students the default password is your birth date in YYMMDD format. If that doesn't work, try using the "Forgot your password" function on the login page. If that still doesn't work, let us know.

• Course materials will not be copied en masse to the new server. Although instructors can copy materials from one server to the other using export/import, we ask that you let us do it. This is because it must be done in a controlled manner to prevent overloading the old server. To request that we copy course materials for you, please fill out the form at http://chinook.eou.edu/ddeforms/bbcoursecopy.cfm.

• A text box appears on form-driven screens in Blackboard, and often includes a visual editor (rows of buttons) with it. A security warning may appear, asking you to accept or trust the certificate from "Design Science, Inc." This is the company that created the WebEQ portion of the editor. You may safely accept or trust this certificate and run the applet. If possible, click on Always Trust.

• We are now running version 7.1 of Blackboard. Our previous version was 6.2. Since we leapfrogged over versions 6.3 and 7.0, there are quite a few new features in this version. Blackboard produces a "Release Notes" document which describes, among other things, the new features in each version. I have extracted the information most likely to interest faculty from the Release Notes for versions 6.3, 7.0, and 7.1, and combined them into a single, shorter document. If you would like more details on the features in these new versions, please see the combined Release Notes PDF file.

• Some of the new features and other information about this version were presented in a workshop. Send an e-mail to Curt Whittaker to request a DVD of the workshop. More workshops are scheduled for fall term. See http://www.eou.edu/ctl/calendar.html for a current schedule.

• Below is a list of areas or features with significant changes that will likely interest most users. They are all described briefly in the Release Notes PDF document, mentioned above. For a detailed explanation of each feature, click on its name, which will open a new window with the manual page for that feature. Many of them are also described and demonstrated in Quick Tutorials, available from within Blackboard or from the main page for this Blackboard Support site.