Although Smart Penguin provides the solutions to, or the prevention of, most technical issues that Clark College Blackboard users may experience, things may still go awry. To help students and faculty get back to their online coursework more quickly, the tech support team in the eLearning Department now provides a new system, called Tech Ticket, which can be used to submit the details of a technical issue. In a series of short questions about their computing environment, online users can quickly convey some of the important keys needed for an accurate diagnosis. Tech Ticket then allows direct communication with eLearning tech support for improved collaboration and information exchange to aid a swift resolution. You can find the link to file a Tech Ticket in the sidebar here on Smart Penguin’s main post page, among our links at the bottom of the page, or just click below.
This issue won’t be a problem if you’re a student, but faculty might come across it when trying to download a zipped file of submitted assignments from the Gradebook using “Item Download.” The error is triggered by spaces in the assignment title, such as “Project 6″ or “Research Paper.” The workaround seems to be removing the space(s) in the assignment name in the content area where the links are. You can use an underscore, hyphen, or just remove the space and then try the item collect routine again. A report from an English professor advises Mac users to remove the spaces and not use an underscore or hyphen – theallonewordapproach worked best for her Mac.
There is a problem with special characters… No, not your Uncle Floyd, but those unique characters that you might use in a file name (like # or &, etc.). In Blackboard, some of these special characters are reserved by the system as operator commands and are considered illegal characters for users. If you attempt to submit a file (like an assignment) using one of these illegal characters in the file name, you’ll likely receive an error message and your assignment will not be submitted. The illegal characters you should NOT use include #, &, $, @, /, \, !, ?, %, ^, *… you get the idea (the list is long and includes most special characters).
