Announcements
Say hello to our new student employees
A new batch of cheerful student-employees started this semester at the help desk. Jordan Abbit, Andrew Santa Maria, Kayla West, and Dalton White, along with our old-timers Angelo Cencioso and Avery Ribeiro, now make up our faculty support Tier 1 team. They can help answer most of your questions regarding Bb Learn, Collaborate, Respondus, and other educational technologies.
Bb Learn UNAVAILABLE Friday Nov. 23 — Midnight – 2:00 AM
Beginning just after Midnight on the morning of Friday, November 23, 2018, Blackboard will be upgrading NAU’s Bb Learn Postgres database to v. 9.6.
Bb Learn will be UNAVAILABLE during this maintenance; please be sure to plan your work and deadlines accordingly. This is an NAU holiday (the day after Thanksgiving). Check for updates at the NAU System Status page: http://nau.edu/outage
Ally coming to Bb Learn this spring
We’re extremely excited to announce that NAU has licensed Ally for Blackboard Learn. Ally automatically checks course materials against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 accessibility standards, provides students with alternative formats such as HTML, ePub, MP3 audio, and electronic braille, and offers guidance to faculty to improve accessibility of their content.
Disability Resources will also use Ally to prioritize courses with large amounts of less-accessible content, and those in which students with accommodations are enrolled. The current plan is to enable Ally in all Bb Learn courses starting in Spring 2019. In the meantime, while Disability Resources, the e-Learning Center, ITS, and other units work to put a support structure in place, any instructor may request that Ally be enabled in specific courses by sending a request to elc-help@nau.edu. Learn more about Ally at Blackboard’s site: https://help.blackboard.com/Ally/Ally_for_LMS.
Preparing for Winter 2018 and Spring 2019
Publisher Content
As you begin to prepare for the next semester, you may not only have a Bb Learn course shell to update, but you’ll want to update your publisher content that is linked within Bb Learn. If you have questions about copying and updating publisher content, you will want to check out the support sites for the publishers. Here are the most commonly used publisher building blocks in Bb Learn:
Course Copies and Combinations
Don’t forget to ask for your course copies or any course combination changes before your fall courses start. You can use the course copy request form to ask for course copies. Please review our Knowledge Base article about course combinations for more information on how they are set up in Bb Learn.