The blackboard system was unavailable for an extended period of time yesterday, February 10th, while emergency maintenance was performed to correct a server failure. The failure occurred just after 12:00pm and service was fully restored at approximately 6:30pm.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

As a reminder, we encourage all users to email blackboard@fordham.edu immediately if they experience any problems with the Blackboard Learning System.

Due to the planned telephone outage at Rose Hill, there will be no Blackboard telephone support on 12/27.

Please email blackboard@fordham.edu for assistance during this time.

Yesterday, we re-launched the Blackboard support site in a new, friendly format. Among other changes, help is now divided into two sections, students and faculty, to help users find answers more quickly.

New look; same address: http://www.fordham.edu/blackboard.

A new plagiarism detection tool is a vailable to Fordham faculty this semester. SafeAssign is an alternative to Turnitin.com that integrates directly with our Blackbaord course management software. Instructors can create SafeAssign assignments in Blackboard, and any papers students submit will be automatically scanned before they are made available for grading in the gradebook. Instructors can also upload papers manually, one at a time, or in bulk.

Those who are familiar with Turnitin.com’s originality reports should will find SafeAssign very similar.

Mor information, including instructions on using SafeAssign and sample reports, is available at the SafeAssign support site: http://www.safeassign.com.

Blackboard will be offline for 24 hours starting

Wednesday, August 15th at 12:00am

The scheduled downtime will allow us to upgrade to the new 7.3 release of Blackboard, which includes a number of enhancements to the Forums, as well as improving performance in general..

To ensure the integrity of our on-line learning environment, as of today requests for Blackboard password resets and other account changes will no longer be accepted over the telephone.

Requests must be submitted to blackboard@fordham.edu and must be sent from the Fordham email account of the person requesting the change. This will help the Blackboard staff confirm the identities of individuals requesting changes.