Each year the University has an upgrade period for Blackboard, normally the second Friday of July. This year the upgrade period will start 8 July at 17:30. During the upgrade, there will be no access to shuspace or Blackboard sites. It is predicted that the upgrade period will end late on Friday evening, leading to a total downtime of…
Shortly we will be launching SHUgo, a mobile app that is designed for students and staff at the University. The initial SHUgo release will provide access to campus maps, library information, campus news, a staff/student directory and an interface for accessing Blackboard sites. The app will work with the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad initially, with versions for Blackberry…
Turnitin will be upgraded at the beginning of September, and will see the launch of Turnitin2. You don’t need to do anything except note that Turnitin will not be available from 6pm on Saturday 4 September 2010 until 2am on Sunday 5 September 2010. You and your students will not be able to submit work…
Since April we’ve introduced a series of changes to our e-learning provision aimed at enhancing the student experience online including the upgrade to Blackboard 9. Another important change is being implemented in September, giving students access to module sites after they have completed them. What will happen to module sites? Module sites will no longer…
When starting to prepare their 2010/11 Blackboard sites, some staff members have noticed they don’t have a 2010/11 Blackboard site that they need. In this situation you should request a new Blackboard site using a tool available in shuspace. Here are instructions about requesting a new module site. To request a module site you will need the SI…
Recently we’ve had a few queries from staff who noticed that some of their students are no longer showing up in the Grade Centre, and actually the Blackboard site as a whole. This will particularly happen in final year modules. When students have completed their studies at the university, they are marked as completed in…
All the 2010/11 sites have now been imported into the live Blackboard system, so you can continue preparing them for next year. Remember that the process for preparing your sites is different this year, so you will need to copy over any content from existing sites that you want to have in your 2010/11 site. However, you can copy…
In past years, we have archived all module sites from the past academic year in mid-September. This helped staff and students identify the correct sites to use and avoided clutter. However it also prevented students from accessing past learning materials, feedback, and grades. There were also instances where students lost access to sites that were still running or…
Remember, this is the last week staff can access the Blackboard 9 Site Development System, which lets you get used to Blackboard 9 before the upgrade (2 July) and start preparing your 2010/11 Blackboard sites. Next week the Blackboard admin team will start exporting the 2010/11 sites from the Site Development System and, after the upgrade, will begin putting them into…
From today, you should have access to copies of all your 2009/10 sites inside the Blackboard 9 Site Development System, so that you can copy any appropriate content into your 2010/11 Blackboard site templates. The Site Development System will be available until 25 June, so we encourage you to access it (http://blackboard9.shu.ac.uk) ahead of the…