Blackboard Assignments
13 August 2007

The Blackboard will be used for a variety of purposes throughout this course, beginning with the pre-test and concluding with the final post-test. The discussion board will be used for preparing case studies. Each working group will have its own sub-site for discussion of its research, and preparation and publication of the class presentation. "Practice" quizzes are available to help students prepare for in-class exams, and some of the written assignments can be submitted via BB forms. A variety of other uses are possible.

In the best of all possible worlds, there would be no spam, phone solicitations or, more to our purposes, power outages or server errors. However, you may have noticed that we don't happen to live in that kind of world. So, when using the BB to submit an essay, it is wise to prepare for the possibility of a server error or lost connection. (In other words, CYA—"cover your assignment," of course.)

  1. Review the assignment on the BB but actually write the essay in your word processor.
  2. SAVE THE FILE.
  3. Copy and paste the essay into the BB. (If it is a "real" essay rather than a rough draft, use the dropbox feature so the plagiarism detection software will run.)

This prevents losing all your work if the server goes down while you are writing your essay. Some students have lost their essays and had to write them all over again because they did not listen to this advice. As you might guess, this is a royal pain, so it's wise to follow this procedure.

NB!One final caveat:
The Blackboard will let you enter a writing assignment more than once, HOWEVER, re-opening the assignment after you have submitted it WILL ERASE IT ALL. So, please resist the temptation to "see if it worked" by opening the assignment after you have written it. You can check it out by going to the "check my grade" section of the BB.