Communications during and after the upgrade

-
Originally posted on Jun 29, 2017

It's always interesting to see how different institutions handle communications with their users.  I thought some might be interested in our approach this year.


During the upgrade users will be redirected to an upgrade status page. 

This page contains
  • an embedded twitter feed where we will post updates
  • an expected ETA for resumption of service
  • a pie chart showing number of stages complete and remaining.
  • an FAQ with further information
You can view a preview of the page here Blackboard Upgrade July 1/2/3 2017  we are likely to remove this link once the upgrade is complete, but the screenshot above gives a good impression.

We're doing this because in previous upgrades as soon as we went live we would have 20+ people using Blackboard within the first ten minutes, suggesting that some had been refreshing often awaiting Bb to return.  Hopefully presenting the information in this way will set expectations and show that we are thinking about our customers.

Following the upgrade we will be promoting a "What's new?" page, with a short description of each change with links to further information. 


With this upgrade we have also added the free version of the Qwickly Building Block and the Open Photo Roster Building Block by Szymon Machajewski, so we hope that users will find those useful and provide more feedback that we can share with the developers.  We've created animated gifs to demonstrate the "floating" submit button and file upload drag and drop, which should give users an immediate understanding of those new aspects.
You can view the page here: What’s new in Blackboard? – Summer 2017

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Should you use Significant Figures or Decimal Places when setting Answer Set options for Calculated Formula questions in Blackboard?

-
Image
Blackboard tests are a hot topic at the moment. I recently recently received a question from Dr Gabriel Weymouth : "I'm positive this is clearly documented somewhere, but I can't find it. How do you make BB apply the correct error margins for calculated formula problems. The logical way of doing it (setting a, say, 2% margin) doesn't work:"
Read more

My updated theme for Blackboard 3800.13

-
Image
As we move to SaaS soon I had to update our theme work to be compatible with the latest SaaS version. So this means I have a nice freshly compiled version to share.  The previously shared version had been lost in the transfer to the new Blackboard Community Site. This explains why I now back up all new posts to both this blog as well as posting on the community site.  A lack of time means that right now I cannot share screenshots of how the new additions to the theme look, but I am providing the source code below so you can experiment with copying and pasting them into Stylus easily, without having to unzip the theme. You can get a good idea of how it all looks by referring to my post: Let me show you my Blackboard . Watch this video for a guide on how to try the theme out without having to install it: Note that the improvement to Review Status required me to apply a separate CSS just for instructors. In Blackboard the review status button has a double purpose when maki...
Read more