Buzz

Welcome to the CE 6 "Buzz" ... news, comments, opinions, thoughts about the Blackboard (nee WebCT) CE 6.0 product.

Buzzers

"Of course, Mr. Bush didn't come out and say he's lobbying for torture. Instead he refers to "an alternative set of procedures" for interrogation."

Blogging. CE 6.1 has added features to the Discussions tool to facilitate blogging and journaling ("Course Journals"?) . We haven't tested or installed those features because we're stuck on 6.0.2. That's because CE 6.1 introduced new issues that we cannot work around (see http://ce-annotations.blogspot.com/2006/07/as-weve-been-testing-ce-6.html). From Jonathan Bacon, Johnson County Community College, webct-users,

Powersight. Powersight is an external module that can extract administrative information from CE and produce reports. Might be good.

crosslisting. CE will support cross listed courses, but the crosslisting has to be specified at the course creation time in order for the "child" course to inherit the course content, etc. Cross-listing after section content is assigned, webct-users, 9/7/2006.

eMail. Popup blockers and course function. Occassionally, students run into CE issues not working depending on which popup blocker they are running. This was noticed in a CE 6.0 course mail function. (webct-users, 9/6/2006)

passwords. There are a variety of password issues with external authentication. Not letting users to change their password in CE seems to be the best way to approach this. (That means that only the system administrator can change passwords. One wonders, however, with roles, whether it would be better to assign admin roles, etc, and use external passwords across the board.)

wmv files. wmv files won't play in AP 1. Do you have SSL enabled? We found that most media files will not paly in Windows Media Player when SSL is enabled. The solution was to turn on SSL for the log-in screen only and then turn it off server-wide. We're not very happy about that solution,. but WebCT says Microsoft must fix the way WMP downloads media files from a secure server...I'm sure Microsoft will be very receptive to such a request. ;-) Jonathan Bacon, webct-users, 8/23/2006

Brian Hawkins, Educause Statement on Course Management Systems and Patents, September 7, 2009. Educause-060907

Darren Cannell, Check the discussion on the Teaching and Developing Online Blog. add your two cents. http://weblogs.elearning.ubc.ca/vschools/

Desire2Learn Fights eLearning Patent, Slashdot at http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/15/1347227. Nordelius writes "Desire2Learn has responded to the patent infringement claim (PDF) cited by Blackboard Inc. regarding eLearning systems. They have argued that Blackboard was negligent in not submitting details of prior art with their patent application, and further alleged that the material described by the patent was documented in 1998 (PDF) by a collaborative international organization, IMSprogram.org, which was actually working with Blackboard at the time."