Oh and everyone who thinks the instructor has any control over whether Bb works properly or not is politely invited to . . . what's a polite way of telling someone to shut it?
When I upload things in Bb, I don't trust the little "successfully uploaded" screen, so I also check myself to make sure they're there. At least five times a semester, students will say to me, "No, it's not there!" I'll look, and sure enough the handout or PPT or whatever will have mysteriously disappeared since the previous day.
My theory is that whoever owns Bb gets bored occasionally and runs a process to delete everything uploaded in the last 2 hours, or whatever.
This unreliability is why I don't have students turn in assignments in Bb, take tests there, et al.
Good luck pry!
I would wonder if the issue is possibly something with whoever's running Bb at your university? So far, I've never had problems with Bb that weren't somehow caused by user error, but we've got a pretty strong and proactive bunch of technicians running everything. The one exception was a university-wide difficulty with assignment formatting last summer, and the tech people knew that it was their fault for doing something weird with an update, so they were able to tell us all how to get around it.
If a Blackboard course has no tech experience prerequisites, it should address the expectations in a simple manner. In your case, your instructor should have posted instructions saying to click on the appropriate icon. You should not be expected to be an expert in the software. That is the instructor's job. It's like telling students to turn in a paper, but refusing to tell them the classroom or office number. It's ridiculous.
Okay, this is where we disagree. I do NOT believe it is my job as the instructor to walk students know the technology, the university is requiring I use in online teaching. As an instructor, I am hired for my expertise in my subject (which is not CMS). I will gladly point students to university-wide tutorials on the CMS, but if there are no university-wide tutorials, then the students will need to figure this out themselves.
But then, I also don't need to tell students the classroom name and number of my course either. It appears on their course registration and its their job to find the classroom by the first day of class.
Hmm . . . I don't think it's exactly our job to walk students through the technology, but it is our responsibility to be able to explain to students how to use the functions that we expect them to use. From what I've seen, many universities just kind of decide that CMS is a GREAT idea and drop it in with barely any training for instructors, and no training for students. So unless you can figure it out and explain it to students, why is it fair to expect them to use it successfully? This is why I never make use of CMS functions I don't understand . . . I just don't want to get caught in that bind.
