BbDrive – available for all staff on request

After a successful pilot we are pleased to announce that BbDrive is now available to all staff to use with Blackboard on both their work and home computers.  We should also like to thank those staff that participated in the pilot for their feedback.

One of the more interesting results from the pilot was that those that had problems were those staff who tried to do too much on BbDrive.  It makes your Blackboard courses work a bit like a network drive allowing you to open and edit your files directly from Blackboard – however as you are accessing your files at a remote location over the web it is slower than if you are using files on your local pc.  For most of the pilot participants who would go to Blackboard make a couple of small changes to a file and leave this worked fine. By contrast some participants moved the majority of their files onto Blackboard and attempted to do significant amounts of work on there (such as creating a 20 page powerpoint from scratch) and they found the slowness problematic.

As such if you are planning on using BbDrive we should stress that it is ideal for adding files  and making small changes to files you have already added to Blackboard, it is however not ideal for making extensive changes to files (such as typing in a word document for 20 minutes).

Regards

Joseph Gliddon
Learning Technologist
Technology Enhanced Learning Team

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BB Drive is a desktop application available on request that you can install onto your PC which makes dealing with your files on Blackboard easier and more efficient.

When you wish to update a file in Blackboard you no longer need to take a copy, edit the copy, save it, delete the original and upload the copy. Instead you just open, edit and save.
Watch this video to see how simple it is.

It is also possible to open your whole course as if it was a network drive, allowing you to drag in new files, move files around, create folders and update files, as demonstrated in this video.

We think that this has the potential to save staff time both when creating and updating their courses. This longer video follows someone through the process of setting up their course.

If you have any questions or would like to use BbDrive please email us at tel-help@bristol.ac.uk telling us your work computer name and we will have it installed on your work computer. If you wish to use it at home we can send you the exe file.

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