Blackboard Faculty – End of Spring 2020 – Updates and Reminders
Greetings Blackboard Faculty,
Welcome to the end of an absolutely different and challenging semester. We hope everyone is hanging in there and realize that you are doing your best given the situation at hand! We are here for you in the support of technology issues you might be having with Blackboard, Kaltura, and the integrations that are a part of the LMS and video management ecosystem (ie. Voicethread, Respondus, Collaborate, etc).
Please note that we are a small team and in some cases it might be best to have you or your students work directly with the vendor, especially if the problem involves a technology-specific error message or if you’re having an issue with the technology after you’ve launched out of Blackboard. In an effort to help expedite the resolution to certain issues, we’ve listed technical support contact information for specific vendors at the end of this post. Thank you for your understanding around this while we all work remotely and are finding creative ways to quickly respond to technical problems.
Blackboard Faculty Tools are working. Please create your courses for Summer!
You can begin creating your courses and copying your content for Summer in Blackboard. Please begin this process if you haven’t already! On April 30th, Learning Systems will be automating the creation of course shells for the remainder of Summer courses. Instructions on how to get started with Blackboard faculty tools can be found on our AskIt page.
Collaborate Ultra Training – Virtual CTLE Workshops
Using Blackboard Collaborate Ultra for Live Class Meetings
Date/Time: Monday, April 27, 3-4pm
Facilitators: Jamillah Martin and Christopher McDonald
Register Here (a Zoom link will be sent once signup is complete)
Kaltura Auto-captioning is on!
Kaltura is integrated with Blackboard and is the best way at VCU to quickly deliver video to your students. In response to COVID-19 and accessibility requirements for video learning content, all new video content uploaded or captured will now be automatically captioned. This means that students will be able to enable closed captions by clicking on the CC icon in the toolbar at the bottom of the Kaltura player. Please reference our captioning and editing documentation page for more information.
Reminders
Blackboard Course Retention – In order to maintain system integrity and efficiency, Bb courses and user accounts are archived, deleted and/or made unavailable on a regular basis throughout the year. This maintenance is based on State and VCU-defined procedures and guidelines.
Note: Spring 2020 Courses will be set to “unavailable” status in early May 2020. Instructors will still have access to their courses, but students will not. You’ll find instructions here on how to make your course available to students if needed.
Final Grades and Downloading the Blackboard Grade Center
- Bb’s Grade Center is NOT the official source for grades. Grade sheets are available on faculty eServices. Final grades are due by noon on Tuesday, May 12th, 2020.
- Downloading the Bb Grade Center can be done at any time, but we strongly recommend faculty download the Grade Center in their Bb courses at the end of the semester, to retain the most accurate data for future grade references. Click here for download instructions.
Vendor Support Contact Information
- Respondus Lockdown Browser and Monitor Support.
- VoiceThread Support
- Softchalk Support
- Kaltura and Blackboard – open a ticket with Learning Systems first: itsupport.vcu.edu