This is a reminder that when you set up an external link to a website, you should change the setting for ‘Open in a new window’ to Yes.
Recently we’ve changed our Blackboard installation so that the webpages inside of it are more secure. This provides our students with a safer environment and improves our protection of student data.
An unfortunate side effect of this move to be more secure is that if you are linking to another webpage inside your Blackboard site and you don’t set it to open in a new window, then your students will get a pop-up window in the Internet Explorer browser recommending that they do not display the unsecure content from the external site. If the students then click ‘Yes’ then they will not see the webpage you were trying to direct them to. If they click ‘No’ then they can access the webpage, though this is not the intuitive choice for users.
Open your links in new windows
We have always recommended that staff set their external links to open in a new window for other reasons, such as allowing the students to see what page they are on and bookmark it for later, some pages not displaying correctly inside of Blackboard, and copyright reasons around ensuring the content is being attributed to those who created it. However this recent change makes it more important that you set your external links to open in a new window.
We are also trying to solve this by having these links open in a new window automatically without staff having to change this setting. If we are able to implement a solution like that we will let everyone know.
That is what we try to do… however sometimes Bb will NOT open a new window despite the “new window” box being ticked in the hyperlink setup dropdown box. How can we get around this one???!!
I’ve asked your faculty e-learning adviser to look at this with you, as I haven’t seen this happen before. If you set up the link as an ‘external link’ type of content instead of creating the link in an item inside of the text editor, then I think this will always open in a new window. There are a few issues with the current text editor (thankfully it should be improved in the next version from what I’ve seen) and how it handles html copied from other sources, which might be the root of the problem you are having with it not opening in a new window.
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