Blackboard Lights
An advisory sorting of Blackboard functions.
 For help with yellow and red coded functions,
consult Maureen Schorr or Gary Pandolfi at Academic Technology.

Content updated 03/26/09
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On Wednesday mornings before 8:00 a.m., Blackboard will sometimes be unavailable for two to three hours for system maintenance.

Alert:

Information Services recommends against use of IE8 with Blackboard. See details in MyQ.
Posted 3/26/09

Green Light
 Feature is working well.
  •   Uploading files to any Blackboard content area, e.g., Course Materials and Syllabus.
  •   Uploading test banks from  
  •   Discussion Boards.
  •   Group Pages.
  •   E-mail.
  •   Grade book. 
  •   Copying items or folders between courses.
  •   Archiving and importing entire course.
  •   Quizzes with text only questions (no pictures).

Yellow Light
Feature is functional in most circumstances. 
Consult your Instructional Technologist at Academic Technology.
  • Best practices for faculty and students using exams in Blackboard. 
  • Copying tests or test pools from one Blackboard course to another.
  • Uploading test banks from textbook publisher’s CD-ROMs. 
  • Downloading publisher course cartridge. 
  • Copying entire course.
  • Exporting course, importing packaged ("zipped") file of course content.
  • Making "permanent" announcements.

    If you select the "Always show this announcement" option when creating an announcement, the announcement may continue to appear on students' portals into future semesters.
  • E-mail sent to entire class will return a receipt of "E-mail not sent" if even one of the messages is not successfully delivered.

Red Light
 Feature is not recommended.
Consult your Instructional Technologist, who can provide alternatives.
  •   Copying test questions that contain images.
  •   Copying material provided by publishers.
  •   Uploading files, such as Word documents, that are still open in the application.
      Such files will appear to load correctly, but will not actually do so.
  •   Uploading files with filenames containing spaces or non-standard characters (e.g., #,~,-,., etc.).  Such files will not be accessible to users in Blackboard.