We are pleased to tell you that we will be installing a new and improved Blackboard building block for Collaborate this weekend. This building block completely fixes the following issues:

Repeat Session option fixed – After the upgrade, you will be able use the repeat session option to setup multiple meetings all at the same time without receiving an error. Meetings can be created for the same day every week, every month, and several other combinations for the whole semester. Additionally, these meetings will now be able to be edited once they are created.

Recordings made in private meetings are now private – After the upgrade, you will be able to setup private meetings for groups of students and any recordings created in those meetings will only be available to the students that you invited to those meetings.

We have also pulled initial data regarding Collaborate usage so far this semester and noticed that there are several of you who still have not yet used Collaborate this semester. It’s not too late to try out Collaborate with your class(es). Please know that we are here to assist you in making your experience in the Collaborate Pilot a great success.

This week, we would like to highlight the new IOS app for Collaborate. This app will allow students to join Collaborate meetings directly from their iPad or iPhone. Like the SabaCentra app, the Collaborate IOS app is only available for participants in the meeting at this time. However, please encourage your students, particularly students who have used the SabaCentra app before, to give the app a try so that they can provide us with comparative feedback on the pilot survey at the end of the semester.

Students can follow these instructions for using the Collaborate IOS app:

1.    If you do not already have the Blackboard Learn app, download it and install it from iTunes.
2.    Download and install the Blackboard Collaborate app from iTunes.
3.    From the Blackboard Learn app, select the course where the session will take place.
4.    Within the course, go to tools and click the Blackboard Collaborate link located near the bottom.
5.    From the Collaborate event window, find the correct session link for your meeting and tap the link.

Here it is almost the end of October. Where has all the time gone? I hope that by this point everyone has had the opportunity to try out most of the interactive features that Collaborate has to offer. If you haven’t yet had the chance to get into using Collaborate this semester, it’s not too late and we are here to help.

First off, we would like to let you know about how Collaborate currently handles recordings for meetings that have been setup as restricted. If you are in the habit of creating meetings for your students, you may notice that even when you restrict a meeting to a specific group of students, the recording of that meeting is accessible to all of the students in the class. Therefore, we recommend that you let your students know that even if they are meeting in small groups, everyone in the class will be able to view the recording of their meeting.

Also this week, we would like to highlight Collaborate’s many emoticons. Collaborate comes with a full set of emoticon buttons available both in the participant window a well as in the text chat area.

To access the emoticon options in the participant panel, simply click on the face in the upper left corner of the participant window, and a dropdown menu of all the available options will appear for you to use.

To access the emoticon options in the chat window, simply click on the smiley face icon in the lower right corner of the chat window and you will be given a large list of emoticons that you can include in your text chat correspondence. The options in the text chat can also be included by typing the emoticon shortcuts such as or :p directly into the text chat window.

We are happy to announce that the problem that was causing the “Null error” that many Collaborate Pilot users were seeing has now been resolved and we have not received any reports of this error in over a week. We apologize for the inconveniences that this error caused.

We would now like to turn our attentions to some of the exciting features that Collaborate has to offer. This week, we will be covering the Web Tour feature. Web Tour is a feature that enables you to not only push your students to a specific web page, but also to take them with you as you click on links within the website. Web tour can be accessed by clicking on the Web Tour link in the upper middle of a Moderator’s Collaborate interface, as shown below.

Just simply type the URL of the web page to which you would like for your students to be pushed and then press return. All students in attendance are then taken directly to the web page.

Web Tour is a great way to show your students videos located on the ECU WinMedia Server as well as take your students to website that you would like for them to view and even bookmark. Best of all, while in Web Tour, anytime you click a link on the web page, your students will be taken directly to the page with you.

We just wanted to send out a quick note to all of our Collaborate pilot participants to let you know about an issue that we’ve seen crop up this week.  We are seeing a “Null error” message appearing when users attempt to click on the Blackboard Collaborate link in Blackboard. We are currently working with Collaborate support to resolve this issue. In the meantime, we have determined through testing that this issue doesn’t appear all of the time, so users who see the error may be able to login at a later time and not see the error. Also, the error does appear to be computer specific, so if anyone experiencing the issue is able to use another computer to join Collaborate meetings and view Collaborate recordings, that may be another temporary solution until the issue is able to be resolved. We apologize for the inconvenience that this issue is causing.

If you or your students experience any technical problems during a Collaborate meeting, please feel free to contact Collaborate support directly at 877-382-2293 or collaboratesupport@blackboard.com.

As always, if you have any questions about the Collaborate pilot, please don’t hesitate to contact one of us. For the College of Business, Jason and Shelly are available to assist you. Anyone else is welcome to contact John, Ginny or Matt Powell.

We are pleased to announce the new Collaborate Pilot blog site. This site includes Collaborate Pilot resources for faculty & students, frequently asked questions, Collaborate support contact information and a collaboration page that you can use to discuss the pilot with other participating faculty. The Collaborate Pilot blog site can be found at: http://blog.ecu.edu/sites/collaborate/.

We are also happy to announce that we will be upgrading Collaborate to the latest version. This upgrade will fix several of the bugs of the previous version, including, most notably, the multiple recordings issue. This upgrade is planned to take place on Sunday, September 16^th. The only downside to this upgrade is that any menu and course links to the Collaborate Scheduler or to individual Collaborate meetings within the content areas of your course will be removed. Please note that the meetings and any recordings themselves will all be saved. This only affects you if you added a tools link to Collaborate in your navigation menu, or if you added links to Collaborate meetings to content areas in Blackboard. If you have setup these kinds of links in your course, we would be happy to put these links back in your course for you. Just let us know by 5:00 PM Thursday, September 13^th, if you would like for us to do this and we will add them back first thing Monday morning.

If you or your students experience any technical problems during a Collaborate meeting, please feel free to contact Collaborate support directly at 877-382-2293 or collaboratesupport@blackboard.com.

As always, if you have any questions about the Collaborate pilot, please don’t hesitate to contact one of us. For the College of Business, Jason and Shelly are available to assist you. Anyone else is welcome to contact John, Ginny or Matt Powell.

We hope that everyone has had a chance to login to Blackboard and give Collaborate a try. As you are working on getting your Collaborate meetings setup in Blackboard, we would like to share current pilot issues and highlight exciting Collaborate features.

Multiple Recordings Issue

We are still seeing multiple recordings appear in some cases after a Collaborate meeting has been recorded. Representatives from multiple areas of ITCS along with Blackboard Collaborate support are actively working on a resolution for this issue. We have re-enabled everyone’s ability to delete your own recordings, however please remember that if you see one of your recordings show up multiple times and delete one of the recordings, all of them will be deleted.

Renaming Repeat Meetings Issue

We have received reports from some of the faculty involved in the pilot, who have stated that when trying to rename meetings that were created using the repeat option, all of the repeat meetings created in that instance are removed. As a result, we are recommending that you either create separate meetings for each of your class meetings, or avoid renaming meeting titles for meetings that have been setup to repeat. Even though the titles are the same for each repeated meeting, the dates listed to the right of each meeting are different and should help your students differentiate between the repeat meetings as seen below.

Whiteboard ClipArt Feature

Collaborate’s whiteboard is packed full of great new features that are available for your use. One example is the well stocked library of clip art that is available to you during your meetings. In addition to math operations, and symbols, you also have several background images that you can use. See below for an example.

Whiteboard Created By Feature

Anything placed on the whiteboard can be identified by the person who placed it. Just simply right click on the item on the whiteboard, and the first line will identify the Collaborate participant that placed the item as seen below.

Need assistance?

If you have any questions about Collaborate, please don’t hesitate to contact one of us. For the College of Business, Jason and Shelly are available to assist you. Anyone else is welcome to contact either John, Ginny or Matt P. Thank you all for your participation in this pilot.