Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Tag: WebCT

  • Off the Twitter Timeline: Clunky WebCT

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    Summize provides a great way to troll for what people are saying. Beyond just searching for a term, it provides RSS feeds for terms. I follow several, such Blackboard and WebCT. The WebCT one netted me the following tweet: annoyed with how clunky webct can be at times – it had to have been designed…

  • IMS Import Error When Node Is Down

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    This is what I got when a node was down while I attempted to do an IMS import in Blackboard CE/Vista. Failed to upload files, exiting. Cause could include invalid permission on file/directory, invalid file/directory or repository related problems The keywords permission, file, and directory in this would have sent me anywhere but to the…

  • Confidentiality

    A student wants Blackboard Vista to not reveal his or her last name. The student has already gone to the Registrar and gotten a confidentiality flag placed on the record. As I understand it, this flag in Banner is a FERPA protection to prevent the record from being provided to parties external to the university.…

  • Upgrade, Upgrade, Upgrade

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    Be more secure! Upgrade today. Want better functionality? Upgrade today. Save a developer! Upgrade today. The save a developer thing is the impetus for this post. The upgrade today mantra annoys me. Software rarely spends enough time in alpha and beta cycles to to identify all the issues. People have been so burned by using…

  • Usablenet Mobile

    Are any of you readers out there familiar with Usablenet Mobile for Education, specifically with Blackboard/WebCT Vista? We have questions… How well it navigates with Vista’s frames and wide variety of views. How well it handles the sessions. The University of Florida has a good look at how Usablenet LIFT works and mentions Vista in…

  • Wrong Number

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    A ticket our Blackboard technical support manager marked as really urgent was picked up by another technical support person who left a note about calling me. Except, the familiar phone number called wasn’t my office number or even my cell number. Nope, it is the office number at my previous job. Yup. I have not…

  • More Spiking CPU Over Assignments

    More on concerns with editAssignmentSubmission.dowebct on Blackboard Vista nodes. Found an error in the exceptions logs tied to one of the transactions: Error occurred maintaining selective release status-Learning Object Id It gets better…. The assignment in question? Not using selective release. Yeah. There is an error for an assessment. Hopefully it is just the assignments…

  • Assignments Spike CPU

    Yesterday a Blackboard Vista node went unresponsive but recovered. Then a second and third did the same. This was odd as only the test which logs into the node reported a failure. Normally, in severe unresponsive cases the Weblogic monitor either reports either one of the parameters we watch is very high or fails because…

  • Finding Sessions

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    Clusters can making finding where a user was working a clusterf***. Users end up on a node, but they don’t know which node. Heck, we are ahead of the curve to get user name, date, and time. Usually checking all the nodes in the past few days can net you the sessions. Capturing the session…