Monthly Archives: May 2009

Protesting Blackboard 8.0

This post is being written in response to the unreliability of Blackboard 8.0—outages, slowness and bugs, oh my! Are we beta testing? Some didn’t realize how dependent we’ve become upon Blackboard until it went down for three consecutive days in mid March 2009.

As I hear rumors that Blackboard is likely to remain unreliable with periodic outages, I’ve quietly been setting up workarounds so the show can go on. Below are some of my tricks; apologies for undoubtedly provoking the ire of some of my friends in corporate IT. And Kevin Wolff in BCTC, everyone says you are a miracle worker. Seriously. Thanks from all of us in the faculty.

Question 1: True or false? Baruch offers a service so you can post items on the web, even when Blackboard is down.

True!

Faculty can sign up for their own blog with Baruch’s Bernard L. Schwartz Communications Institute (the sponsors of this blog). The blogs are easily formatted to have the look and feel of a web page (example). Post away! (Another option is the eReserve.)

Question 2: True or false? When Blackboard is down and you want to post a giant file, you can send emails with large attachments (say, up to 1 gigabyte) for free?

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Posted in Using Technology | 14 Comments