Blackboard will be updated on Friday, January 5, 2018 beginning at 5 PM EST as part of DoIT’s biannual Blackboard update. No downtime is expected: Blackboard should remain online and available, but some tools and services may be slower to respond during this twelve-hour cycle as those backend processes restart across supporting servers.

Prior to the update, Blackboard’s overall look will be refreshed during the holiday break with a new system theme featuring standardized colors, fonts, and spacing for greater consistency between the learning management system, Bb Collaborate, and Blackboard’s mobile apps.

The new theme also provides:

• Support for Mobile Devices - When users log in to Blackboard on a mobile device or tablet, screen elements such as the course menu and control panel compress or change position so they stay visible. As the screen gets smaller, modules and tool tiles stack so you will still have access to everything at your fingertips. 
• Support for Accessibility - The updated theme follows WCAG 2.0 principles and accessibility guidelines for structure, color contrast, and navigation. New ARIA landmarks define the page structure in courses, menus, and content areas to better assist users with screen readers in navigating page elements.

Standardized across the entire Blackboard system and all courses, this theme is also the first step toward the Ultra Experience, which UMBC will begin to explore with a small pilot in SP2018 in partnership with Blackboard.

Two new features will also be available in this release:

• Course Availability Status - An open or closed padlock, located next to the Student Preview icon in the upper right corner of your course, will represent its availability state to students. Instructors can modify the availability of the course with one click within the shell.  
• Chemistry Notations in Content Editor - The math editor will be updated to feature tools specific to chemistry including an embedded periodic table of elements.

Finally, the inline grading tools will be upgraded over the same weekend after the main Blackboard site is updated. The Blackboard update occurring on Friday, January 5, is a requirement before the inline grading tools can transition to the New Box View on Saturday, January 6. Inline grading tools may be unavailable for up to six (6) hours that morning. Faculty will be able to download student submissions during the conversion process, but the inline grading tools within Blackboard will be temporarily unavailable. Please review the FAQs about grading with inline tools during this transition.

In preparation for this downtime:

• Instructors: If you need access to your gradebook during the downtime, please review this FAQ for information on downloading a copy of the Blackboard Grade Center to Excel.

After the Blackboard update is finished, please clear your Internet browser cache and cookies before logging in using these step-by-step instructions.

The UMBC Blackboard team identified a time period that should have a reduced impact on our users. If our Blackboard site is down longer than expected due to unforeseen circumstances, updates will be posted to this news article. We appreciate your patience as we continue to improve our systems to bring you a better Blackboard experience.

As always, if you have any questions, please consider the following options:

• Check our extensive FAQ collection
• New Bb Features | Known Issues | Updates & Fixes
• Open a ticket via RT
• Follow the Instructional Technology & DoIT myUMBC groups
• Request a consult with instructional technology staff

Four faculty will redesign and teach courses using Blackboard’s Ultra Experience, the next generation of Blackboard’s learning management system during the SP2018 semester.

As part of a unique partnership with Blackboard, the pilot is a collaboration between UMBC’s Blackboard Faculty Advisory Team, DoIT, and Blackboard staff to ensure a successful faculty and student experience before a scaled deployment of a major upgrade.The partnership also allows faculty, students, and instructional technology staff to provide essential feedback about the current state of the Ultra Experience and shape its future development. 

The four faculty and courses are:

• Liz Stanwyck - STAT 451: Introduction to Probability Theory
• Tim Phin - HIST 456: The Roman Empire
• Gary Williams - EHS 102: Emergency Medical Responder
• Mary Tabaa - EDUC 792: TESOL Internship

What is the Ultra Experience?

The Ultra Experience is the first completely cloud-based system from Blackboard, representing a new focus on improved workflows and deep integrations to support teaching and learning. Featuring a more personalized, proactive, and intuitive interface for faculty and students, users will encounter a navigation and activity stream that provides quick access to the most critical information to easily stay updated and take action in and outside of the virtual course environment. 

Embedded analytics keep students informed about their progress and tell quantitative stories about learning. The new interface provides a more seamless transition between mobile and desktop, allowing students to move between app and browser. 

Why the Ultra Experience?

Since 2000, UMBC has maintained the original Bb Learn 9.1 environment, beginning with self-hosted servers on campus. In January 2015, UMBC migrated its self-hosted environment to Blackboard’s managed hosting facility in Virginia. During the Summer 2017 term, DoIT announced the transition to Blackboard’s cloud-based architecture to update our system with little to no downtime, increase the scale the system in response to load, and increase services when demand is high. The transition to Blackboard cloud was also a technical requirement to evaluate and subsequently migrate to Blackboard’s future systems using the Ultra Experience, which was announced by Blackboard in July 2015.

Tools have been added, upgraded, or retired over the years to Bb Learn 9.1, but with the exception of Blackboard Collaborate, which was deployed in the Ultra Experience to all courses in WT2017, no significant changes to the overall Learn 9.1 interface has occurred. Each month, however, Blackboard releases new tools and improvements to the Ultra Experience, allowing faculty to quickly innovate. Although the original Learn 9.1 experience we currently use will be supported in the near future with some modest development, the future of Blackboard is in Ultra. 

We’re very excited to introduce the Ultra Experience to you over the next 18 months. As you explore the new interface, redesign your content, or take classes, please tell us how you use Ultra to enhance and improve the way you teach and learn. In the coming months, we will share a migration website and timeline, frequently asked questions, and roadmaps with demos.

Blackboard course shells for WT2018 and SP2018 were created on December 6, 2017.

About Course Creation

Bb shells for WT/SP2018 are available for all courses (designated as lecture, lab, field or discussion) listed in the UMBC Schedule of Classes (SOC), provided that there is an instructor of record listed. As new course sections and/or instructors are added to the SOC by Department Scheduling Coordinators, corresponding Bb shells are automatically generated overnight. 

• If you are an instructor, and your name is not associated with the course you are teaching in the SOC, please see your Departmental Scheduling Coordinator to resolve the issue. Once you are listed in the SOC, your Bb course shell will be created automatically. 
• If you and your Department Scheduling Coordinator believe you are correctly assigned as the instructor of record in the SOC and you do not see your course shell in Blackboard, please submit a Request Tracker (RT) ticket via my.umbc.edu/help.
• If you need a Bb shell for a research or independent study course, please submit a new course request.

Instructors who teach multiple sections of the same course will find those enrollments merged into one Bb course shell. These sections may be split upon request by an RT ticket, which we recommend submitting at least one week before the semester starts, if not as soon as courses are created in Blackboard.

Student enrollment in Bb mirrors the official registration in SA and updates hourly. However, courses are not accessible to students by default until the instructor of record makes them available.

As always, if you have any questions, please consider the following options:

• Check our extensive FAQ collection
• Open a ticket via RT
• Follow the Instructional Technology & DoIT myUMBC groups
• Request a consult with instructional technology staff

As part of our ongoing commitment to security, the Unix Infrastructure group will be conducting its quarterly system patching on Thursday, December 21st and Saturday, December 30th.  While many of the systems will be patched without any service disruption, there are some systems which require the downtime of key services.  The schedule below outlines which key services will be offline and for how long.

Thursday, 12/21/2017 between 5pm and 8pm (most systems will only be down for a short period during this time): 

• The web hosting environments (virthost and jabba) will be partially unavailable (pages will be available but any database calls will not work)
• Access to Cyrus and UMBC Webmail (accounts not migrated to UMBC Gmail)
• All mail will be queued up and delivered after the server is patched
• Expected to be unreachable from 5pm to 7pm
• All HFS (user) servers will be offline
• Certain software licenses will be unavailable (autodesk, cadence, idl, schrodinger, xilinx, mathematica)
• RT will be offline between 5pm and 6pm

Saturday, 12/30/2017 between 10am and Noon(most systems will only be down for a short period during this time):

• myUMBC lite page will be up resulting in reduced myUMBC functionality
• Wiki will be unavailable
• The sites (wordpress) web hosting environment will be unreachable

Please let us know if you have any concerns or questions.

Thanks.

Tim Champ

Manager of Unix Infrastructure

UMBC DoIT

On Thursday, December 21st starting at 2pm LDAP-Master and Webadmin will be taken down for system maintenance.  During this time account creations and password changes will be unavailable.  Account authentication and logins will not be affected during this downtime.  

The maintenance window will allow staff to apply needed security and application updates.  The outage window is expected to last two hours with services being restored by 4pm on Thursday, December 21st.

During the outage window account creations will be queued and then processed upon restoration of services.  If you have any questions or concerns, please contact our Technology Support Center at x53838.