Recent Important Changes in Blackboard, August 2nd

The University has upgraded its Blackboard system to the latest version. There are two important changes in the new system:

1. COURSES ARE UNAVAILABLE TO STUDENTS UNTIL YOU MAKE THEM AVAILABLE:
This setting allows you to build your courses privately and only give students access when you are ready. To make a course available to students, please review this quick tutorial: Making Courses Available to Students.

2 . COURSE AND SINGLE FILE SIZE QUOTA
Storage for course materials in a single Blackboard course is limited to 250mb. A single file may not exceed 10mb. These quotas are consistent with those used by several other Universities and will prevent the uploading of large audio and video files which use up costly disk space and slow overall system performance. Blackboard has always advised that users link audio/video files to other storage systems rather than upload them to Blackboard.

There are a few options for adding links to audio/video files in Blackboard:

• Utilize our storage on Itunes U. This is the simplest option as this process is automated in the new Blackboard system
• Request storage space on a University server

For large text files exceeding 10mb:

• you can request University server space
• use third party FREE storage such as Google Docs

The advantages of storing materials in a central storage space, either University-based or third party, include the ability to link to your reusable materials without having to re-upload them to Blackboard every time. Using this method, you will only add links to these larger materials in Blackboard.

Please contact your school’s Academic Technology department for help or questions with any of the above.

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