If you use the Banner Grade Submit tool in Blackboard to submit midterm and final grades you may notice that the tool is unavailable. After consultation with our Enterprise Systems team, we determined that the changes that were needed to accommodate the change in grading in response to the sudden shift to remote instruction were not possible to make in the system and the effort needed by faculty was too great to use the tool. To avoid confusion and reduce the frustration that would be generated by a tool not functioning properly, we made the decision to turn the tool off for this term.

Instead, faculty will submit grades through LeopardWeb where they will have a dropdown option for each student that will reflect the grading scheme for that student. To use the Blackboard tool would require that faculty know which students have petitioned for  P/NC and which students are still receiving letter grades. There was no way to get this information to display in Blackboard.

While this may result in more work for faculty in large enrollment classes, we believe the increased accuracy of grade submission and reduction in frustration from errors is worth the temporary change.

Because you may now be using GoToMeeting to hold classes in response to Covid-19 you may want to integrate it into your Blackboard course site.

It takes only a few steps to add GoToMeeting to your course menu, making it easy for students to find your scheduled meetings:

• Navigate to your course in Blackboard.
• Click on the add menu item button on the course menu.
• Enter a name for the link, such as GoToMeeting or Class Meetings and click on the checkbox for available to users.
• Select GoToMeeting from the list of available tools.
• The menu will now show the new link:
• When your students click on the link, they’ll be taken to a GoTo Meetings page
• Students can join from this page, accessed through Blackboard.
• Note: Do not move the link to the top of the menu. This will reset the course home page and due to the way the integration displays there will be no access to the course menu.

After provisioning Zoom accounts for all faculty, we have established Single Sign On (SSO) for our Zoom license. In addition to allowing users to login with their Wentworth credentials, the system auto-provisions accounts. This means that you do not have to contact DTS or LIT to get a Zoom account on our license. Follow the following steps and you’ll soon be “Zooming”:

1. Navigate to https://wentworth.zoom.us/
2. Click on the Sign-in button
3. You will be taken to the Wentworth Sign-in page to authenticate.
4. Enter your Wentworth email address and password and click submit.
5. You will now be taken to the Zoom Profile page and can enter some identifying information.
6. Congratulations, you now have a Zoom account and can host meetings.

See our Zoom Resources page for more information and links to tutorials.

If you are trying to use any of the YouTube Mashups in Blackboard, you will receive an error:

This is a known issue and is due to YouTube restrictions on API calls exceeding their limit. Blackboard is aware of the issue and is working with YouTube to resolve the issue.

In the meantime, the best option is a workaround:

1. • In a separate browser window, open YouTube and search for the content you wish to display in your course.
   • Locate the Share button in the interface and select “Embed”.

• Copy the full embed code.

 

• In the Blackboard content item, select the HTML display option and paste the embed code into the HTML window.

• • Click update to embed the video.

• Next submit to post the content item.

This workflow will embed the YouTube video into your Blackboard course so that students can view it.

Note: Blackboard is working on a solution with YouTube but at this time with so many institutions relying on their LMS’s to provide instructional resources for students it would be best to expect that this workaround may be needed for the foreseeable future.