A number of sporadic problems with sending email from Blackboard to students have been reported in the last few days.

[ UPDATE: These issues have now been fixed as of Friday 4/4/08 1:30 PM.

The network team has fixed the email problem that was blocking the delivery of email from Blackboard. All the emails that were waiting to be sent will now be delivered, but it will take a couple of hours because there were several thousand of them. ]

Symptom

When sending email to All Users (Control Panel > Send Email > All Users), some of the students, or even you, do not get the email.

This has happened to several faculty in the last week, but is very irregular: it happens only in some courses and only to some students. If you are using the Send Email feature in Blackboard, be sure to check with students that the emails are arriving.

Cause

This sporadic email non-delivery is caused by our email spam filter system. It is not a Blackboard specific issue; it sometimes happens to other network applications, too. The spam filter was updated and tightened last Fall in response to complaints about increased email spam, but one of the side effects is that it sometimes blocks legitimate mail. The issue has been taken up again this week by the OIS Network staff who are looking into it.

Workaround

In the meantime, there are two workarounds: 1) use regular email, 2) instead of sending the email to the whole class (”All Users”) at once, send it in small batches to selected users only: Control Panel > Send Email > Single/Select Users and choose just a handful of names each time.

Also, you may want to post an Announcement in your Blackboard course as another way of communicating with your class.

Yesterday afternoon the Faculty Senate voted unanimously to approve the LMIS Committee recommendation that UPS adopt Moodle as our new Learning Management System.

New UPS Chief Technology Officer Molly Tamarkin has proposed we adopt the name “Move To Moodle” for the project of rolling out Moodle over the next year to two years. The move will be gradual. Over the summer, OIS will form a technical team to plan and manage the conversion process.

For more information please visit the Moodle page.

Instructional Technology has worked over the last two years to respond to faculty input from the LMIS Committee to evaluate our Learning Management System needs. Many thanks to all Moodle testers, faculty and students (over 350 of you), for your hard work and willingness to take the lead, to experiment, and to put up with the inevitable difficulties that come with pioneering.

During the break, the Blackboard server was upgraded to add more disk space to it. Since last spring, Blackboard has been constantly more than 85% full, and by the end of last fall term was at 95% full.

On January 3rd, a disk upgrade tripled the size of the available room on Blackboard, which should provide plenty of room for PDF and audio files for the next year or two.

Remember, you can tell how full Blackboard is on the login screen near the bottom.