You can now check student assignment using Turnitin within Blackboard.   Here is how:

Setting it up:

1. Make sure your “editor” mode is turned to “on”;
2. Go to the folder where you’d like to post the assignment;
3. Click on the “create assessment” tab;
4. Select “Turnitin assignment”;
5. Choose “paper assignment”;
6. Click on “next step”;
7. Give the assignment a title, point value, and set start, due and post dates (post dates mean the dates students will see their grades and your comments.)
8. Expand “optional settings” to make additional choices.  I strongly recommend that you set these based on your needs and then scroll all the way to the end and check the box beside “Would you like to save these options as your defaults for future assignments?”
9. Click on “submit” to finish.

Asking students to submit papers:

After you have finished the above, tell students where to locate their assignments and submit it.  They do NOT have to go to any external sites to sign up for anything.   You might, however, explain to them that their assignments will be checked for originality.

Grading it:

1. Click on “course tools” (on the control panel on the bottom left);
2. Click on “Turnitin assignments”;
3. Click on the name of the paper;
4. Click on the name of the paper;
5. Click on “originality” to check for assignment originality, check “grademark” to add comments in the paper, click on “peermark” to grade peer evaluation (if you have set up papers for peer review).
6. Please note that you can grade, comment on the paper directly without having to go to the Grade Center.  Just check for the “–” sign on the top right corner to add your grades.  Click on “grademark” to add comments in the paper.

Please go to this page for additional information and video tutorials.

During the faculty luncheon on Jan 18, 2012, I was asked if we can set the default setting of paper submission to “standard paper repository”.  However I found that if I set such global setting,  you will be deprived of the choice to opt out and submit the paper to “no repository”.    There are situations you do NOT want to submit papers to repositories, for instance, you have assignments with sensitive information you do not want to share with the rest of the world.  So the default value is “no repository”.  You can, however, set your own default value when setting it up.

Turnitin is a tool that may give you data to make informed judgements about originality.   It does not replace human judgment.   Not all “matching” is a case of plagiarism.   During the demonstration, I encountered a rather telling case myself.  I uploaded an article I wrote myself to check originality.  It shows 8% matching with another source.  (Yikes!)    Knowing that I have not plagiarized,  I sent in a request to the instructor of the class asking for the “original” paper.  The professor sent me the “original paper” very quickly.  It turned out that the student was actually citing something that I wrote in this article (which I published earlier).   However, as I submitted my paper later than him to Turnitin, it shows my work as having 8% matching.  Therefore, if you are ready to make accusations of plagiarism, be aware of the times of submissions.    Student A may write a paper that was then plagiarized by student B, but it is possible that student B’s paper goes into Turnitin database earlier.  So Turnitin just use a neutral word of “matching”, while you will need to determine whose paper is being plagiarized or cited.

Sites such as Google and Wikipedia recently blacked out home pages as a protest of the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) bills.   If passed, these bills could mean the end of the Interlocking labyrinth of the Internet as we know it.    Whatever their good intentions are, sponsors of the bills did not know how devastating such bills could be towards freedom of speech, e-commerce and average people’s lives.   The bills will censor foreign sites as well as American sites that are supposedly “facilitating” the operation of outside sites.  Foreign sites may then lose domain names and become dysfunctional.

One does not have to be a visionary to see what that means.   In the alternative universe of my home country of China, similar reasoning is used to block US sites, though it is often out of political motives.   Sites such as Google, Youtube and WordPress are also often, if not always, blocked because they have content that the authorities think are against Chinese laws.    Rumor says that Facebook founder Zuckerberg failed to update his Facebook status because it is blocked while he was visiting there.   Similarly parents wouldn’t be able to share with relatives home videos of kids playing soccer or singing in a recital without creating accounts in China.

Life can go on if such sharing isn’t possible, but the bills would also create virtual silos to disrupt or disable constructive communication and collaboration between peoples, businesses and other organizations.   Years ago, I tried to use some online platforms such as WordPress to build pen pal ties between elementary school students in China and in West Virginia in a cultural exchange program proposed by the Pearl Buck Birthplace Museum.  It never left the ground, because most sites we tried were blocked.

For every illegal activity such bills stop,  dozens of innocent activities could be killed.   Currently the bills are vague,  giving media companies much leeway in choosing which sites to mess with.    It lacks granular precision in targeting the illegal activities per se.  It was like evicting all tenants of an apartment building after finding that one of them had been engaged in drug dealing.    The burden of proof would also be shifted to the rental office and the other tenants to prove their innocence.   The bills would result in a legal nightmare for these people, not to mention the forced censorship and self-censorship for compliance,  which in turn would hurt things that make America America, such as personal freedoms, entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation.    I sometimes write for Chinese media, but I often found my articles taken off the press as some topics are blocked from public discussion in general.   Not again.   I can see that the two bills will create a slippery, downward slope.  So watch out, America.

Such bills are intended to protect domestic businesses, but for the revenue thus recovered for media establishment,   the rest of the society may have to pay for lost opportunities.    I hope Oklahoma state representatives will help to stop these bills.

Recently we have been alerted that there was occasional complaint that Blackboard did not record the work a student said he or she had submitted.

In the case of tests, if submission fails or if computer crashes in the middle of tests,  you as a professor can do a number of things:

• If you have chosen “forced completion” (I do not advise it for long tests), edit your test options, if only temporarily, to allow the student with the problem to go back and complete the test.
• If a student has finished the test, saved the answers, but couldn’t submit it, you can go to Grade Center, find their test attempt and submit it for them.
• If students are using Lockdown Browser and their computer freezes, you can help them to exit by using the proctor option in the “information” or “about” (depending on whether students are on the Windows or Mac side) tab on the Lockdown Browser menu.  It requires a password which you can set when you set up the test for using Lockdown Browser, or you can use a generic password you can get from us at the North Institute.  Please do not share the password with students.

When we migrated to Blackboard 9, we chose to keep older courses in Bb8, while new courses are created in http://bb.oc.edu.  So your Blackboard home page probably looked rather clean.   After a couple of semesters, however,  your list of courses can get rather long.  Here is how the problem can be addressed:

1. Courses are regularly archived.   Courses older than three years will be automatically archived.   None of the courses in Blackboard 9 is three years old, so they will still remain there until they are three years old;
2. You can hide some existing courses by going to the Blackboard home page, clicking on the gear-like tool to go to the course list personalization page;
3. Check the courses you would like to show, uncheck the courses you would like to hide.   Such changes can be rather granular.  For instance, you can show the course name but not ID.   Remember to “submit” for the change to be saved;
4. If you change your mind and you would like to see a course you have hidden earlier, you can go back to the course personalization page, check beside that course, and “submit” to show the course again on your home page;
5. Using the same gear tool, you can go the ordering page to reorder your course list by making your most frequently used courses to the top.  Use the arrow key on the left to drag.   Remember to “submit” for the change to be saved.
6. To reduce the clutter in students’ list, please make sure to make your courses unavailable (control panel–> customization–> properties –>check “no” for “make course available”)

In the past, we copied course materials by exporting it from an older section (source course) to a zipped file, and then go to the new course (destination course), and import it.   This is a somewhat cumbersome process.  It still works, but Blackboard has added a new function for you to copy course directly from one semester to another, provided the course you copy from and to are both within the current version of Blackboard (http://bb.oc.edu).  If you move content from earlier semesters (such as Fall 2010), you still need to follow older procedures of exporting and importing.

Here is how to easily copy courses within BB9.

1. Go to the destination course, copy or write down the course ID;
2. Go to the source course;
3. Click to expand  “packages and utilities” on the control panel (bottom left of your course);
4. Click on “course copy”;
5. Under “select course type”, choose “copy course materials into an existing course”;
6. Type or paste the course ID (it has to be the exact ID, including hyphens or underscores);
7. Choose the items you will need.  (Do NOT choose “include enrollments in the copy”. )
8. Click on “submit” to finish.  Wait till you receive an email notification saying that the copying is completed.
9. You can now check your new course to see if everything looks fine.  You may need to reorganize your course menu by changing the order or deleting items you do not need.

Suggestions:

1. This is optional, but I find it helpful to clean up the items on the course menu in the destination course before copying.  Sometimes after a course is copied, you see duplicate items, and that’s why it pays to clean up the items in anticipation of the copying process;
2. If you have tests, assignments or other activities that are associated with the Grade Center, you have to select “course materials” , “grade center columns and settings”, “tests, surveys and pools” all at once when you make your copy.  Otherwise, you risk breaking the links.  The same applies for graded discussions, blogs, wikis or journals.
3. If you find you have some difficulty after the course copy, do not try to copy it again and again, otherwise, you may have copied the same content over multiple times without knowing it, and it is going to be a headache to get rid of items.  Instead, contact the North Institute so that we can figure out with you what the problem might be.  When you contact us, provide the ID for both the source and destination courses.

Blackboard Grade Center is a very good tool to help you put your grades together for submission.  Here are a few things that the Grade Center does very well:

1. Adds up all your grades using the “total” column;
2. Dropping some of the lowest grades for a particular category;
3. Calculating grades based on the weighting methods you set in the syllabus.

Please let us know if you need any help in doing any of these.

Here are a few tips that would make things easier when you calculate your final grades or when you set up your course for the next semester:

1.  Organize your Grade Center so that it shows exactly what you want to see, and the way you want to see it.  Once in the Grade Center,  go to “manage” and then “column organization”, then select the columns you do not want to be shown, such as “user ID”, “availability”, and “last access”, move to the top to click on “show/hide”, click on “hide selected columns”, and then “submit” (at the end of your page) to save the change.  It will make your Grade Center less cluttered. You can also drag columns to various locations to show the columns in exactly the order you set. Please do not forget to click on “submit” once you have made the changes.

2.  Freeze certain columns:   In the same “column organization” view described above, you can drag your “total” column above the bar that says “Everything above this bar is a frozen column”.  Wouldn’t it be nice to see the total score next to the students’ names as you work through the grades?

1. Use the fictional John Public user to test whether your calculations are correct.  You can add John Public to your course yourself by going to “users and groups” on your control panel to enroll him.  His user name is john.public.   I would make John Public the model student getting a perfect score in everything, and then I can tell whether the total score adds up correctly.   Quite a number of faculty members have taken advantage of the John Public role in their courses.

Some common errors with Grade Center use:

1.  You calculate your final grades by category but you didn’t assign columns to categories.  To solve the problem, please first create the category, if you haven’t done so already.  Here is how:  Grade Center –> Manage–>Category–>Create category–> Submit.

And then go to column organization to reassign columns to categories, and here is how:  Grade Center –> Manage–>Column Organization–>Select columns–>Change category to –> Click on the category you need –> Submit.

1.  Another common error is you checked “no” for “include this column in Grade Center calculations” when creating columns.  Please change this to “yes” for a grade to be calculated.  This setting is set individually for every column, so it is rather difficult to determine which one it is that has this problem if you have something like thirty Grade Center columns.  It is better to leave the value as its default “Yes” when you create new columns in the future.

If you have any questions, please contact the North Institute. To ensure your issues do not fall in the cracks during the finals week, it is best to send your questions to this email: supportcentral@oc.edu.  Thank you very much!

As you get ready for the new semester, you might want to know that you can transfer courses from one semester to another within Blackboard.     If you are transferring content within the current Blackboard (http://bb.oc.edu).   The transfer involves two processes:

• Exporting your courses into a zipped file.   Please see this movie for the detailed process.
• Importing the zipped course into your new course.  Please see this movie for further instructions.

This is a rather simple process, but one of the warning I want to give is that sometimes it takes quite a bit of time (5-10 minutes) for the content to import over.   Once you hit the “submit” button, and you do not see anything coming over, do not panic and do not try to import it all over again to have two sets of everything in your course.  If you have any issues or questions, contact us by sending an email to support@oc.edu with the ID of courses to copy from and to.

If you have content you want to transfer over from the earlier version of Blackboard. Please click here to read the instructions.

After importing the content over from the previous semester, here are some additional information you might need to know:

• Set the entry page for your course;
• Make your course available to your students;