Attending:
Matt Davis, Sr. Sol. Engineer, Blackboard
Paula Lee, CE 8.0, Lee College WebCT Admin
Sam McCool, NevSt: Manager, Instructional Technology, Vista 4.2.3
Mary Holmes, Ferris State University, holmesm@ferris.edu, E-Learning Admin, 8.03
Randy Dalhoff, Sys Admin, Iowa State, V8.0.3
Pete Boysen, Sys analyst, Iowa State, V8.0.3
Scott Randle, Ferris State University E-Learning Specialist, v8.0.3, rand15@ferris.edu
MelodyB-ColoState-CE802: Melody.Brake@colostate.edu, Colorado State U, Institution Admin, CE 8.0.2
Joe Jacobson: jajacobson@utulsa.edu University of Tulsa, V8.0.3
Nick Dean: nick.dean@marshall.edu, Marshall University, LMS Administrator, Vista 8.0.2HF1
Amita_Alamo-Colleges-Vista8.0.2: amahajan@alamo.edu, Alamo Colleges, System administrator/Network Analyst.
Tim Lambert UMOL: tlambert@umassonline.net. UMass Online. Integration Support Specialist Vista 8.0.2
Jamie Bethel, Paula Lee, David Schlater
Hot Topics
David Schlater - updated the group on the quiz attempt-missing answer issue. He found 42 cases in which students received a 0 despite completing a quiz event. He isolated most of the events to a specific lab on the Idaho campus. Randy reported finding similar incidents: 70 students, 140 occurrences. On some computers, when students click the [Save all] button at the end of a quiz, the computer saves the answers; on other computers, a Get request is sent instead, erasing the data sent to the grade book (see John Porter's message in last week's notes).
Affected environments: Vista 8.0.2 and Vista 8.0.3. End user environments: uncertain about computer settings, plug-ins; it could happen on any computer environment with Firefox, IE, and Safari browsers with an undetermined plug-in or add-on.
To find the incidents, David used the grep command posted in the forums to identify when get events occur after the Save all is initiated. The command for unix is - "cat webserver.log* | grep ''saveAllResponse'' | grep ''GET''.
Discussion followed about testing policy and procedures. Blackboard is working on the technical side to fix this issue so that some computers will not blank the answers.
Amita Mahajan - asked about how others were saving courses from inactive inventory and then removing them from server. Discussion followed about methods of archiving courses and deleting courses. Matt Davis added this note in chat: "Tracy Toliver at UIUC recenlty completed a large project retiring old sections, you may want to reach out to her as well."
Melody Brake - is interested in getting aggregated usage data and asked about Astro open-source use and when it could be deployed. Matt said that Seneca College in Toronto took it as a joint project with Astro Bb Classic 8 and Bb Learn 9. The school together a suite of scripts and queries, creating a front end interface that makes it easy to use Astro. Jack Sharon referred Melody to the work of Scott Kodai and Ron Santos. Scott Randle provided this link in chat: http://aimlessmusing.com/2009/07/20/extracting-useful-information-from-the-powersight-kit/#more-75
Round Table
Amita Mahajan - nothing new.
David Schlater - updated the group on the patch to fix log issues related to custom login page. Received a patch, but it wasn't dated the same as the one Randy received. He received another patch, and it was missing files. At this point, David is trying to figure out which of the patches to use. Randy reported that he tried several and reverted to a combination of the patches.
Jamie Bethel - nothing new
Joe Jacobson - nothing new
Matt Davis - nothing new
Melody Brake - asked about a resolution for the grade book issue of rows not lining up. Mary reported that change the media setting for monitor and minimum 1024 x 768. DPI must be set default resolution. In Bb, users should use Default Font Size for Tool settings.
Nick Dean - nothign new.
Paula Lee - asked about synch application for iPhone from Bb Classic and Bb Learn. Matt confirmed that it is not for Bb Vista. When she arrives at Behind the Blackboard, she finds that the link to student support for CE/Vista appears to be dead. It is actually a title; the links below for Blackboard e-Packs and Student Access Keys are still active.
Brett Hardee - asked about when a student is trying to do individual save for each question and then the right hand side frame disappears. Melody Brake reported a similar situation: she found that students could leave the exam and reenter without losing questions.
Pete Boysen, Randy Dalhoff - at 12:45 a.m. last Saturday the Bb servers went down. A listener on the Oracle database was stopped. Between 12:05 and 12:10 they were hit with PHP and related commands as though somebody was trying to hack into a Moodle system. The attack originated in Poland, so they blocked the Polish IP address. A Moodle server was also attacked and all of the sections on it were removed. MyPHPAdmin is a free tool to manage a PHP database. Somebody is using it to try to hack at databases on IaSt campus.
Sam McCool - reported on discoveries working with Safari 4.0.3 and Mac OS 10.6. He recommended that when Mac users upgrade to Mac OS 10.6 from the DVD installation disk, they remove previously installed versions of Safari, even verions 4.0.3, and re-install Safari from the Apple upgrade DVD.
Scott Randle - nothing today.