What You Can Do When Blackboard 8 is Unavailable

A. Communicate with your students

Send an e-mail message to the students in your class and let them know about extended deadlines and other changes in your class schedule (if any).  

Also consider attaching important files (like reading assignments) to the message.

B. Find other ways to distribute materials

If you are using a computer lab or smart classroom, bring files you intend to use on a USB drive or CD.

Rather than e-mailing important files to your students as attachments, put these files on an alternate server such as

• your Socrates web server space
• other personal web servers
• personal server space which comes with most home ISP (Internet Service Provider) contracts
• (free) personal server space provided by various organizations/vendor including Google Documents
• the BMCC library's E-Res system
• shared folders provided by file synchronization services like Sugarsync (free 45 day trial) or Dropbox (first two 2GB are free)

If you have exported or archived your course previously, you can take that zip file and:

• use a utility called "bfree Blackboard" which is available at no cost from the University of North Carolina ( http://its2.unc.edu/tl/tli/bFree/about.php). This utility unzips your export/archive file into a series of html pages that you can view on your computer and/or upload to a web server. Please note that not all content may be extracted.

C. Things to do when Blackboard 8 is available 

Backup:

• The entire course, including student work (archive)
• Course content, excluding student work (export)
• The Grade Center
• Student email addresses

If discussion board posts are important in your teaching, save important threads or forums (using the "collect" feature).

If you have students submit assignments online, make sure to download all submissions (as one .zip file) as soon as the deadline has passed.