MELA Meeting Minutes 2003 - 2017

should have access Friday afternoon and through the weekend to get their courses ready. NOTE: 11 colleges voted yes for the upgrade; 1 college voted no for the upgrade, 3 no responses. c. SNAPSHOT DATES – CHRISTIAN PRUETT. It is critical to send your fall snapshots now, if you haven’t already done this. This includes users falls, etc. We need to go ahead and fix data errors that occur. BB is building us an additional customization that will help us fix the SSN issues in the GUI. Traditional Enrollments, Courses, Users, etc. Fall virtual files will be sent out as soon as Ive returns from vacation. Those will be sent a week ahead of the course start date. Tish recommended that we go ahead and reset the course dates so that students will not get in there earlier. Ive is going to target August 18 th for the first snapshot files from MSVCC. If you use a template you’ll have to go in course by course. This affects online instructors only, not traditional. When you are sending up your courses file, please set the course duration a little longer than the last day of courses. Add at least one week to the end of term. This will allow time for students to review their grades. If you set July 31 st the course ends at 12:00a.m. that morning. Dr. Jenkins asked how long we can go back to the courses. The current life cycle is two years for online courses. Traditional courses may be on a different life cycle, depending on what you set at your institution. We are more prepared this fall than where we were last fall. You also have to remember that the two year life cycle will also cause slowness in the system. d. NEW MSVCC MODULE – TERRY POLLARD – Mlogging, Blogging. Typepad is considered the best blogging tool in the country. After the Vegas conference I was using my iphone and taking pictures, etc using typepad. I was able to post immediate information from the Blackboard World conference on my blog. You can also tie these blogs directly into Blackboard. You can use iPhone, Bb Curve/Pearl, Palm, Nokia Symbian Series 60WWindows Mobile 5 and 6. Using Typepad you are able to add comments and password protect the documents. Within Bb you can create an ISS Module, with a one hour refresher. We’ve created a module that you are able to pull into to your Bb site, called MSVCC News and Resources. These will include new training resources, PDFs, screencasts on MSVCC site; New workarounds for Grade Center or other Bb bugs; updates from Bb ASP on problem/issues. Best be deployed on the school faculty tab (example: Holmes Faculty, Hinds Faculty, etc). Sign the sign-up sheet if you are interested in having this display as one of your modules. The second module is “your module”. If you have your own phont-to-blog Bb module; sign the sheet if interested in this as well. This option is for those that are on the go. Jennifer asked since D2L have a RSS feed option. We would like this to be added as well to the MSVCC Home page. There is the option to conditionally release to just faculty, etc. The MSVCC tab will be removed from all Bb courses. Audra said that she will need to use the toolbox on the left-hand side of the screen that connects to our current website. These link out to MSVCC.org pages. The links will not change, but the page will be updated. Would like to take down the MSVCC home tab as the way that it currently looks. Will discuss with the colleges because they are using some of the links. e. ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION ON GRADE CENTER PROBLEMS – CHRISTIAN PRUETT – Java application that runs within a database. We will have gradecenter issues in the fall. If you run into a problem with the gradecenter, the best work around is to receate a course from scratch and recreate each grade item one by one. This is not the best solution, but this is a viable work around. Christian said that part of the problems are broken links to the gradecenter when courses are copied over. Terry asked what other schools have had problems with gradecenter. Chris said that one complaint is that you have to wait for the gradecenter to load, reload after you make corrections, etc. Lametrius Daniel asked why some grades did not show up in the gradebook. The work is…. Jennifer asked the question about the problem with tests locking up due to the test time limit. Michelle said that it was all or none. Having the test time limit caused test lockup. Need to discuss this with Bb. Michelle said that she had a student who

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