It is at the discretion of the instructor/leader to make their courses/organizations to be available to guests.

To allow guests to access your course/organization, three procedures may be required.

To make course/organization available:

• Go to Course/Organization Control Panel
• Customization -> Guest and Observer Access
• Section 1: Allow guests to access this course? Click Yes.
• Click Submit

To make course/organization tool available -

• Course/Organization Control Panel
• Tool Availability
• Make sure all boxes are checked for Guests

Making contents available to guests

For example – You have a menu link for syllabus, click on chevron button, you will see options of permit guests or deny guests.

Sharing your course to your guest -

• Have your guest to go this following address: https://my.gallaudet.edu,
• Click Courses Tab
• Type your Course ID in Course Search (i.e. PSY201)

Please contact your eLearning Specialist if you have any questions or concerns.

Over the weekend, submissions to the SafeAssign service have started to decline, which coincides with the end of the semester at many institutions. Delays will continue to be felt over the next few days, but we have seen a significant reduction to the number of papers waiting to be processed by SafeAssign. The expected time to process papers is still 3 – 5 days, but as the week progresses, we expect the time to decrease. As before, the plagiarism detection service continues to function normally, and has not been impacted by the number of submissions.

We have identified a number of papers that encountered problems during processing, and added them to the queue as of this morning. As the week continues, we will know more about the state of these papers, and we ask that you do not resubmit papers at this time.

We thank you for your patience.
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Please contact eLearning Specialist if you have any questions

SAFEASSIGN PERFORMANCE UPDATE:

SafeAssign continues to experience long delays as a result of paper submission volume. The expected turnaround time for papers submitted is still estimated at 3-5 days from the time of submission. The processing and accuracy of the plagiarism detection remains normal, but the high volume of submissions has impacted paper turnaround time. Given projections from historical usage, we expect the significant delays to decrease near the end of next week as the semester closes.

Additionally, we are working to identify papers that have encountered processing problems and plan to reprocess those papers on Monday, December 19 when we expect the submission rate to slow. We ask that you do not resubmit papers at this time as it will not improve the turnaround time.

We thank you for your patience.

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Please contact us if you have any questions or concerns regarding this announcement.

According to Blackboard, Clients should expect turnaround times for papers submitted at 3-5 days from the time of submission.

Blackboard realizes the seriousness of the issue and they already are underway with efforts in produce significant improvements in their processing capacity ahead of the peak submission season in Spring 2012.

Blackboard is pleased to announce the General Availability of Service Pack 5 for Blackboard Learn™, Release 9.1 (9.1.50119.0). This notification contains important details of this Service Pack, so please review this entire message.

With this service pack, we will shut down Blackboard (my.gallaudet.edu) for 27 hours starting Friday, May 13 at 6:30 am and ending on Saturday, May 14 at 9:30 am.

Highlights of Bug Fixes in this Release:

There were 120+ fixes in this release. Here are a few issues that had a high client impact which are now fixed in Release 9.1, Service Pack 5:

• Course Files Issues – This Service Pack is a key element of the Course Files Issue Resolution Plan, which is comprised of a series of fixes over three Service Packs (Service Pack 3, Service Pack 4, and Service Pack 5). With Service Pack 5, we are renewing our recommendation to use the Move Course Files Utility. Course Files migration is an integral part of the recommended upgrade path to Blackboard Learn, Release 9.1. Problems related to files moved using the utility after upgrading to Release 9.1 were discovered. This Service Pack provides a more stable Move Course Files Utility that allows you to move all course content from the legacy storage area into the Course Files directories and take full advantage of the Course Files functionality.
• Security Focus – This Service Pack further hardens Blackboard Learn, Release 9.1 from Cross-site Request Forgery and Cross-site Scripting attacks. Cross-site Request Forgery is an attack that attempts to execute actions on behalf of a user authenticated into Blackboard Learn. This release protects key parts of the product, such as the Grade Center. Cross-site Scripting is an attack where malicious scripts are injected into Blackboard Learn. This occurs when specially crafted values are entered into a variable of a web page or stored and displayed by the application. Oftentimes, an attacker would need to convince an authenticated user to access a malicious web page, record, etc., in order to attack the authenticated user. In addition, this release resolves authorization vulnerabilities in the Address Book, Calendar, Grade Center, Portfolio Comments and Display, and Tasks.
• YouTube Mashup not working – AS-155470
• When attempting to add a YouTube video to a Content Area within a course, the course builder was confronted with an error, rendering the video unwatchable. The failure was due to changes in the Google/YouTube API. Blackboard updated our Blackboard Building Block with the additional libraries and resolved the issue.
• Cannot run Course Report (Could not initialize class) – AS-152718
• When instructors attempted to run a Course Report from the Course Control Panel, they were experiencing a “Could not initialize class” error. We were able to correct this issue in Service Pack 5 and successfully generate detailed Course Reports.
• Index out of bounds error access Grade Center attempts – AS-155183
• This ‘Index out of Bounds’ error was generated when instructors attempted to access a student’s assignment from the Grade Center that was locked in the “In Progress” state. This issue and allowing ‘Force Submit’ for ‘In Progress’ assignments were fixed and no longer generate errors in Service Pack 5.
• Access Denied error in Grade Center when clicking “save” and “next” – AS-154913
• This issue was only reproducible using Internet Explorer as your browser. When utilizing the ‘Save’ and ‘Next’ button in the Grade Center resulted in an “Access Denied” error message for instructors. This along with several other Grade Center issues were all addressed in our latest release.
• Course Copy to Existing Course does not copy across course files that are not linked. – AS-154521
• When attempting to copy a course into a new or existing course, the course files that were not linked to Content Items (or pages) within the source course were not being copied over. This issue was resolved and all links, content, and items can successfully be copied from one course to another.

If you would like to create an extra credit item in your gradebook rather than creating assignment with an extra credit marked.  There are two different ways depending on settings, whether you weigh the grades or not.

Adding Extra Credit Items (Weighted)

If you want to give your students an extra 15 points of the total course grade for completing extra credit.  Click New Item in Gradebook, set the category to Extra Credit, type 1 in the Possible Points field.  The task is not completed, you still need to modify your Weight Grades setting.  Return back to Gradebook and click Weight Grades and set Extra Credit to 1%. You might need to lose 1% from other area, such as homework or attendence.  The total of weighting point value must be equal to 100%.   There is one more task for you to complete the concept of extra credit.

In the Gradebook, give ALL the students 1 point to avoid complaints that only a total 99% is possible without the extra credit value.  If a student completed the extra credit item, you may add the point value to the gradebook. 1 point plus the value that you gave to the student. If the student got 15 points out of 15 possible points, he/she will get 16 points in his/her extra credit column.

Adding Extra Credit Items (non Weighted)

To display extra credit items, click New Item, set the category to Extra Credit, make the possible points to 0 (zero).  Make sure it is marked to score calculations.