-- excuse multiple points in a single message --
-- usefulness of back-ups
We have recently had a couple of major loses of information from
individual course sites and therefore looked at how we could recover
them from the server back-ups. In case you are interested, one was
deleted by mistake the other was caused by an anomaly whereby all the
previous announcements were wiped when a new one was posted. After
investigating this I discovered that there doesn't seem to be any way to
recreate or restore a course or sections of a course using the
Bb/docs/courses/1/folder data. This is because the crucial information -
about folder structure and names etc - is not stored in the courses
folder but in the database - so when you recreate the contents folder
the items will still not be displayed within the course.
It seems that the only way to maintain a usable back-up would be to
archive each course and this cannot be done automatically. We are going
to look into whether we can devise a mechanism to automate this for all
courses. Has anyone else tried to do this? Has anyone else managed to
recover lost information from a course site? What is the purpose of the
back-ups if you cannot extract a particular courses content? The back-up
would only help if you were going to over right the complete courses
folder and database. So all the activity after the back-up was taken
would be wiped - which seems to cause more problems than it would solve.
I hope there is something obvious and simple that we are missing that
will allow us to recreate an individual course site easily.
-- staff and student support information
There are various hand-outs and help information on our LInst Online
pages:
http://online.linst.ac.uk
-- email unreliability
I have reported the email unreliability to Bb support. What is the
situation with this? Is it an acknowledged failing? It would seem to be
crucial that email delivery was 99.999% reliable as it is one of the key
uses of blackboard. I have also heard that adding attachments can be
problematic as well.
-- a couple of points for the wish list:
1. Own posts to discussions should not be recorded as new - this is
misleading and it is time consuming having to click on your own posts to
remove the 'new' flag. (The flagging system leaves a lot to be desired
anyway).
2. Homepages are formatted as HTML. Therefore students have to be taught
about <P> tags just to make their content readable as otherwise
paragraph spaces are removed. There should be an option to use text
(smart or otherwise) as there is on all the other text input boxes.
--
all the best
ben
--
IT Research and Development Unit
THE LONDON INSTITUTE
65 Davies Street London W1K 5DA
--
BlackBoard / LInst Ønline (staff support)
http://online.linst.ac.uk
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