Start of Semester - Fall 2011
If you have questions about or require additional information on any of the topics discussed below, visit the Blackboard tutorials page or contact ITS at ftc_help@siue.edu or at 618-650-5500.
Announcements
- Blackboard Training "Boot Camp" - A series of Blackboard training sessions has been scheduled for August 8, 10, 11 in a "boot camp" format (Blackboard will be down August 9th for an update, more information is available below). At the end of three days, participants should be well-versed in the most frequently used aspects of Blackboard. While all faculty and staff are welcome to attend, these sessions should be of particular interest to new faculty and those who find it difficult to make training sessions scheduled during the academic year. Register today at: http://www.siue.edu/its/bb/fac_staff/workshops.shtml.
- Upcoming Training - There are still several ITS training and open labs scheduled in the upcoming weeks. Training will be offered on Luminis, Banner, WebNow, and MS Office 2010. Hone your skills or learn something new for the fall semester. View upcoming training opportunities and register today!
Start of Semester Blackboard Activities
ITS suggests the following start-of-semester activities involving Blackboard:
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Requesting Blackboard Course Shells - All Blackboard course shell requests must be made online by choosing the appropriate option under "Blackboard Faculty Forms" at
http://www.siue.edu/its/bb.
- Please allow 3 to 5 business days for us to process requests for new course shells. Remember that you can request that we copy materials from a previously taught course into a new course shell at the time the new course shell is requested.
- Note that we generally do not add students into a Blackboard course until the Thursday or Friday prior to the start of the course. If you need your students to have access to a course early, please specify that in the "Comments" section of the online request form.
- To ensure that your fall course shells will be ready for the first day of the fall semester, be sure to submit your complete request no later than Thursday, August 4th for the Schools of Dental Medicine and Pharmacy, or Monday, August 15th for all other academic divisions. Requests received after those dates will be filled within 3 to 5 business days in the order in which they are received.
- Remember that all newly created courses are set to be "unavailable" at the time of their creation and cannot be seen by your students. When you deem your course is ready for your students to see, you must make it available.
Application Updates
- Blackboard and a number of related software and/or plug ins have been or will be installed or updated prior to the start of the Fall 2011 semester, including:
- Blackboard update- Blackboard will be unavailable for use between midnight and noon on Tuesday, August 9th while the system is updated to the latest service pack.
- Turnitin- Turnitin, an intellectual property verification tool, is replacing SafeAssign effective this fall. The building block was installed late last spring and was used in a number of summer classes. Please see the Turnitin section below for additional information about this product.
- Respondus- The annual license has been renewed for Respondus, StudyMate, Author, and LockDown Browser. Users accessing Respondus and StudyMate Author after July 31st will be prompted for the new license key. The license key can be located on the "Download Installation" web page for each product via http://www.siue.edu/respondus. Due to licensing restrictions, those pages are only accessible via an SIUE IP address.
- Turnitin is an intellectual property verification tool which is immediately replacing Safe Assign in Blackboard. Turnitin serves as a plagiarism checker in that it: flags text that has been identified as closely matching other internet, article, or student resources; displays possible sources where that text is located; and indicates the percentage of a paper that is attributable to other sources. The tool will ideally reduce overt and accidental plagiarism by helping students understand quotation attribution and citations. Turnitin does not analyze or identify spelling, grammatical, or citation style errors. Turnitin accepts the following file formats: Microsoft Word (.doc and .docx), plain text (TXT), rich text (RTF), PDF, HTML, WordPerfect, and PostScript. Instructors can set up Turnitin assignments in their Blackboard courses to let students submit papers. Instructors not using Blackboard can also set up courses on the Turnitin site to let students submit papers; in this case, both instructors and students will need to create accounts on the Turnitin site. In both instances, the student submissions are checked against Turnitin's comprehensive databases of source materials and Originality Reports are generated that list the results of the matching process. A resource site has been created to address the Turnitin options both inside and outside of Blackboard.