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.

If you know the dates of your Critical Activity on Blackboard or QMP until the end of August 2014, please forward them to TEL-Help@bristol.ac.uk

Please provide the following information:

* Course ID or name

* Date and time of activity

* Type of activity e.g. Submission, Exam

(For online assessment activity could you please include the following code – M for mock, A for assessment and E for final exam)

* Number of students sitting the exam/Submitting

* Room name or number where the activity will take place, along with a contact number (if applicable)

* Contact Name and phone number

This information is vital for the TEL Team to plan system maintenance and upgrade.

All dates will be entered onto the critical dates spreadsheet, you can check your dates by clicking on the link below:

https://www.ole.bris.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/institution/Blackboard%20support/Critical%20Dates%201314/Critical%20Dates%202013_14.xlsx

As part of the ongoing work updating the Secure Area Network storage our colleagues in Information Services need to make some changes to the way Blackboard saves data to the database.

To ensure that Blackboard is running at its optimum in time for the start of teaching next week this work will take place today. As a result Blackboard will be unavailable between 17:00 and 17:30.

If you or your students have any questions please email TEL-Help@bristol.ac.uk

 

 

 

 

The Blackboard database backup completed successfully on Friday evening, so we will not now need to take the Blackboard service down on Sunday.

 

Following the move of Blackboard to the new SAN hardware, IT Services need to make an additional backup of the underlying database. This process can take up to 10 hours, during which time the responsiveness of Blackboard is significantly reduced.

Significant work has already been undertaken, and will be restarted at 21:00 tonight (Friday 17th). If the additional backup only requires a short time to finish it will be left to complete tonight. If the process could take up to 10 hours to complete it will be rescheduled, and start on Saturday 18th at 21:00.

While the additional backup is being made Blackboard users will notice performance degradation. If the backup process is still running at 07:30 on Sunday morning, Blackboard service will be withdrawn while it completes. This will make the backup quicker and will ensure that it finishes as soon as is possible on Sunday. As soon as the backup has finished, Blackboard will be brought back online.

If you or your students need access to Blackboard on Sunday morning please let us know by emailing TEL-help@bristol.ac.uk.

Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this necessary maintenance causes you.