MELA Meeting Minutes 2003 - 2017

come up since last Friday’s call. There is a security protocol that was not included in 8, which causes issues with all of our rights and permissions. Wade will be correcting this issue once the system is restored. Bb has teams on standby for testing and resolving potential issues that may arise. Respondus, Wimba, and Turnitin should be working. All the import/exports were completed. MSVCC has over 115,000 users, the second biggest client for Blackboard. Please make sure that people do not click submit multiple times after requesting an import/export. We were projected to spend 4 million dollars on our Blackboard contract. Thanks to Christian, we have negotiated the contract down to $2,100,000. Over the life of the term we will save between 7 – 8 million dollars. Outcomes will be free this first year for the colleges that choose to use Outcomes. Rebecca asked if courses were not copied prior to the upgrade, will the old courses still be available? The answer is yes, but the courses will have the new homepage, rather than the announcement page in Bb 8. You can change this setting by going to styles and settings. The following are questions that keep getting asked: 1. Manual Textbooks (Terry or Christian). There is an option in Bb 9, on the content page, which allows instructors to input textbook information. The concern is that they may input incorrect ISBN, etc. Terry and Christian will check to see if this function can be turned off. 2. Email Notifications (Terry or Christian). There are a lot of notification features in Bb 9. One of these features is a global setting where email notifications can be modified. This will be turned off so that it remains the same as we currently use in Bb 8.

3. Rubrics tool is now working and can be used for any assignment. This is a tool built in blackboard that can be linked to grade items within the course itself.

4. Can you save Grade Center reports (Terry or Christian)? Grade center reports cannot be saved.

5. New Grades Notification (Terry or Christian). We now have the ability to create an early warning system rule. We also have the ability to create an assignment with a due date notifications that will post to the homepage. This function will show the student that an assignment should be submitted and it will show the instructor that they have an assignment that needs grading. Old Business a. Strategic Plan. The strategic plan goes through 2013. We worked on updating our strategic plan during the fall 2008 boot camp. Each subcommittee should focus on the items included in this plan.

V.

Jackie Bailey-Hall made the motion to accept the strategic plan as presented. Chris Jenkins seconded the motion. Motion carries.

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