Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: learning context

  • Safeassign

    A couple thoughts about problems with Blackboard’s SafeAssign product. The product appears to be designed to be used by a single institution learning context from CE/Vista systems. We have an institution (InstA) which hosts collaborative programs. Faculty quite reasonably would like to use SafeAssign at InstA just like they do at their home institution (InstB). It appears…

  • Tracking Specific File Use

    CE/Vista Reports and Tracking displays summaries of activity. If an instructor seeks to know who clicked on a specific file, then Reports and Tracking falls down on the job. Course Instructor can produce a report of the raw tracking data. However, access to the role falls under the Administration tab so people running the system…

  • Preserving CE/Vista Settings

    I’ve been asked for notes about this a few times. So here’s a blog post instead. 🙂 A coworker is working on scripting our updates. We lost the Luminis Message Adapter settings in applying the patch to the environment we provide to our clients. Fortunately, those settings are maintained by us not our clients. So…

  • LC Oddities

    IMS XML for Blackboard Vista 8: Say Division1 exists. We want to create Group1 inside Division1. Ignore that Division1 already exists and write XML to create it again. Create Group1 with relationship tag info for Division1. Starting with Group1 doesn’t work unless command-line overrides starting learning context to be Division instead of Group. Luminis XML for Blackboard Vista…

  • webctbackup

    John made a good point… While telling Blackboard about this is pointless, the community at large ought to be aware of another undocumented workspace issue. I found an 8GB .bak in the /u01/app/nodeA/weblogic81/webctbackup on the active JMS node. Taking out user accessible nodes is okay in my book as with 18-20 of them in our…

  • Enrolling Administrators

    One of the challenges of having 42 institutions is managing the administrators. (Actually we created some 12 spare institutions but why is another  post.) So my challenge was how to not drive myself insane trying to enroll the 6 same admin users to each institution. The best way in my opinion is to create the…

  • IMS Data Going to Wrong Place

    I should know better than to trust documentation over my own intuition. Or to change based on what others tell me. I followed: Log in to Vista Enterprise as a Server Administrator or Institution Administrator. NOTE: To set glcid, you must log in as a Server Administrator. From the Administration tab, click the Utilities tab.…

  • Section Archive Easter Egg

    Blackboard support wants a backup of a section to replicate the instructor claimed behavior. Fine. I started making the backup, but I ended up closing the browser to go home. This morning, when I checked, the backup was not in the Vista file manager at the course level where I created it. So, I created…

  • Enrollments

    In spelunking the Vista database, the main pieces of an enrollment are the user, the learning context, the membership, the role, and the role’s label. Its almost trivial how easily these tie together. Once you have them, then you can do all kinds of cool things… Administrator reports Section Designer role was deleted but the…