A recent Microsoft Office update causes Turning Point and PowerPoint to conflict with each other. If TurningPoint gives you the following error message “TurningPoint has detected an open version of PowerPoint. You must close out of PowerPoint before proceeding into ‘PowerPoint Polling,’” please follow these steps:
Hello and welcome to fall semester 2019! The Center for Instructional Technology (CIT), formerly the Faculty Resource Center, is here to support your use of The University of Alabama’s enterprise-wide instructional technologies. For Fall 2019, there are some notable changes to our supported technologies:
Blackboard Learn
Tegrity Lecture Capture
Turning Technologies Clickers
Campus WIFI
Adobe Creative Cloud in Labs
The CIT also supports the technologies that integrate with Blackboard – Box, Turnitin, Collaborate, TurningPoint (clickers), and VoiceThread, to name a few. Please visit cit.ua.edu and accessibility.ua.edu to explore our instructional technology and accessibility support offerings. We have a full schedule of workshops and webinars for the Fall semester, as well as our tutorials, on our website. We can also assist you with setting up your professional website via people.ua.edu. Visit the People site to request a website and schedule a workshop. To check on the status of our technologies, visit our Known Issues page at https://cit.ua.edu/category/known-issues/.
Contact us via email at cit@ua.edu.
Have a great semester!
After our August 2019 update of UA’s Blackboard Learn system, we have noticed some instances of course menus with black text, which renders it virtually unreadable.
The fix for this issue is to go to the Course Management menu, then
Users logging in to Blackboard Learn after recent upgrades may be asked to agree to Privacy Terms and Conditions via a click-through announcement. This announcement is part of Blackboard’s efforts to meet newly required international data privacy regulations, including the European General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR. The GDPR and other data privacy regulations require that users be asked to newly agree to existing privacy notices.
Instructors and students are invited to stop by on one of two scheduled sessions at the Center for Instructional Technology in Gordon Palmer Hall for help preparing for the Fall 2019 semester.
On Tuesday, August 20th, between 9am and 2 pm, instructors can stop by A232 Gordon Palmer Hall for assistance in setting up their Blackboard course. Bring your laptop or flash drive and make sure your course is available, and upload your syllabus. Learn some basics, set up your grade center, and find out about other instructional technology tools available to UA instructors.
On Tuesday, August 27th, between 9am and 2 pm, students can stop by A232 Gordon Palmer Hall to get familiar with Blackboard, customize their notification settings, learn how to submit assignments, and register their clickers.
And, of course, walk-ins are always welcome. Come see us and chat about your instructional technology needs and wants.
Blackboard will be performing scheduled infrastructure maintenance on Friday, July 26, 2019 from 1:00 AM – 5:00 AM. Collaborate users may experience brief periods of intermittent availability during this time.
UA’s Blackboard Learn system will undergo mandatory security-related maintenance from Wednesday, August 7 at 8 p.m. until Friday August 9 at 5 p.m. Our Blackboard Learn servers will be unavailable during this maintenance period.
Many Blackboard customers, included UA, have been experiencing intermittent slowness issues since the morning of Wednesday, July 3rd. Blackboard is aware of the problem and they are working to correct the underlying issue.
Needs Grading has a new option for showing items that are not included in grading calculations, which is always unchecked by default. If the “Include in Grade Center grading calculations” setting is not selected for an assignment, test, or other Grade Center column, it will not display in Needs Grading without selecting this new option. The box must be checked each time, and you must select Go.
Maintenance work is scheduled to be carried out on Sunday, June 30th, between 12am-7am CT. Please note that Tegrity will not be available between 12am-3am CT.
