Urgent notification to all staff regarding BB Assignments

Dear Colleagues,

You may have noticed that Blackboard was effectively offline for a period of time on Friday (27/11/09) or that it was very slow to respond. This is due to a bug with the software we have recently unearthed. If an Assignment is released to Groups rather than each individual Student – the system will become very slow to respond. We must therefore request that no member of staff uses this function inside the VLE.

We have been in communication with the software vendor about this situation and Blackboard have confirmed that there is an issue with the ‘group release’ of assignments that causes severe system-wide performance problems.

If an Assignment is released to a Group of students, rather than to all students individually, the system is placed under disproportionate ‘load’ when even one student accesses this Assignment. If the Assignment is released to many Groups, the system is likely to become extremely slow to respond to these and all other users and may, to all intents and purposes, be rendered offline.

Blackboard have as yet been unable to provide a date for fixing this bug.

We are sorry to state that if an Assignment that has been set to be delivered to Groups comes to our attention – we will have to disable it immediately.

If you have already set up an Assignment in this way – please get in touch and we will do our best to provide a ‘workaround’ solution.

If you have any comments or questions please get in touch at vle-support@qmul.ac.uk

Regards,

Eoin McDonnell

If you have any issues regarding the information in this service announcement, please contact the VLE Support team via the online query form on http://www.esd.qmul.ac.uk/vle/forms/ce6query/