DoIT has had several reports from faculty who have been unable to simultaneously post a Blackboard announcement and send it out as E-mail to students. This action generates an error message indicating that the announcement was created but that the E-mail was not sent.

This is a known issue with Blackboard, and is due to a non-standard character in the Blackboard course title. Testing has revealed that the parentheses ( ) and forward slash / characters are not problematic, but the inclusion of a colon : in the course title will cause this error to occur. DoIT is working with Blackboard to obtain a patch to fix this issue. In the meantime, if faculty experience this issue, the workaround is to edit the course title to remove the non-standard characters.