Issues Problems and Workarounds

Accommodation Accommodations in the Ultra Course View are set for

individual students and apply to all Assignments and
Tests in the course. Accommodations can include
adjusting time limits, exempting students from time
limits, and exempting students from due dates.
Accommodations might be used for students with
ARC accommodation requests.
Workaround: To grant students accommodations,
select Roster on the Course Content page > click the
3 dots on the right end of the student row > select
Accommodations in the student’s menu > select Due
date accommodation or Time limit accommodation >
click Save after setting up the accommodation.
Students with accommodations appear with an icon
next to their names in the Gradebook and Roster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0h_BZ23FA8

Assessment exceptions An exception includes additional attempts or

extended access, even if the assessment is hidden
from other students. An exception overrides the two
settings applied to everyone else for that specific
assessment only. Exceptions might be used for
Students who have internet issues, disabilities, or
technology and language differences.
Workaround: To grant students assessment
exceptions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UE1KuTOoxY

Exemption Exemption is used to remove assessment items from

an individual student’s Gradebook record entirely.
Workaround: To grant a student assessment
exemptions, open the Gradebook in List View > click
the name of the assignment to view all individual
attempts > find the student in need of an exemption
> click the 3 dots menu to the right of the student’s
name > select Add or edit exemptions > check the
box labeled “Exempt grade” > click Save. Once
saved, the student's grade for the item will display as
"Exempt" in the gradebook, in both list view and grid
view.

Discussion Forums and Faculty members expressed their wishes to have

Threads discussion forums and threads in Ultra. In Original
Course View, instructors can post a weekly graded
discussion Forum with several individual threads, and
each thread can have its own individual title.
Discussions in Ultra don’t use forums and threads.
Workaround:
 1. Instructors can create a weekly discussion
folder/forum with individual discussion topics/threads.
The problem is that you cannot assign a grade. In
other words, you need to grade each topic/thread
individually.
2. Another workaround is to list each discussion topic
as a response to the discussion prompt and let
students reply to it. This could be confusing for
students

Change Due Date, Show Workaround:

Date, and Hide Date 1. You can simply change the visibility from Release
Condition to Hidden from students (or Visible to
Students) > change the due date > then set up the
new Release Condition.
2. Check off the box labeled as Date/Time or just the
box labeled as Hide after > go to change the due
date > come back to change the show date.
3. It is a good idea to use batch edit to change due
dates. Once you change the due date, show date and
hide date will be automatically changed accordingly.
4. We strongly recommend that you do not use hide
date as it will prohibit your students to view their
grades and feedbacks of the assessment item. You
can check the box labeled as “Prohibit new attempts
after due date” to prevent students from submitting
new attempts after due date.

Student Do Not See Workaround:

Grades and/or Feedback 1. If the assessment item is set as
hidden/unavailable, students will not be able to see
their grades and feedback, as they cannot even see
the assessment item in Gradebook.
2. For assessment items with hide date and time,
students can see their grades but cannot view their
submissions and feedback after the hide date and
time.
3. If you select Hide under When will content appear,
students will not see the assessment items at all after
the hide date.

Text Format Issue Workaround: A lot of complaints from students, but

not much we can do to help them except to tell them
to attach a Work document.

An assignment is Even when I grade students on an offline assignment,

indicated as "Not there is a note indicating the assignment was “Not
submitted" even though submitted” under each one.
I submitted a grade Workaround: No Submission means that you have
not created a submission entry in BB. This is what
 you need to do to create such an entry:
Click the student’s name, which opens the Create
Attempt panel > you specify the approximate date
and time when the student submitted her assignment
> click Save, which opens the grading page. This will
change No Submission to Submitted. Of course, you
can type in the student’s score in the grade pill on
the grading page > write feedback if any > click Save
or Save Changes. You can just ignore this whole
process, as students see only “Graded” in the Status
column and will not see "No Submission" on their
end.

Grading Status still Workaround: There are two grade pills on the
shows “1 to grade” after assignment submission page (see attached
the grade has been screenshot). The one on the left is the one for
posted assigning grades for a student′s submission, while the
one on the right is for the final grade or the
overridden grade of the assignment. In case of no
overriding, the same grades in the left grade pill will
show in the right grade pill. If you type in your grades
only in the right grade pill, the Grading Status will
show something like "1 attempt to grade" in the list
view and "New Submission" in the grid view. In any
case, students will not see "1 attempt to grade" in
the Grading Status column. Instead, they will only see
"graded" there. If you grade using a rubric, this
should not happen as BB automatically fills out both
grade pills. The Grading Status should show “nothing
to grade.”

Students cannot see In the Release condition, students cannot see the
their grades and feedback for discussion boards.
feedback if the Workaround: If you want students to see their
assessments are hidden. grades (make the assignment visible in Gradebook),
you will have to make the assignment itself visible to
students. Please go to the Course Content page and
select the assignment. At the top right corner, you
will see the visibility setting. Select the dropdown
menu and make it visible to students. Please see the
attached image.

The instructor cannot I have tried and tried many times to understand how
change the time zone in to change this basic setting, but I did not manage to
Blackboard as the time find the option that would allow me precisely to
zone is set automatically change/set the time zone.
by data from the Workaround: Unfortunately, There is no setting to
internet browser. This update the time zone in Blackboard as the time zone
causes students who is set automatically by data from your internet
live in different time browser. You may consider either of the below
zones to get the wrong solutions.
due date and time. 1. Updating one of your browser's time zones to EST
and using it only for Blackboard (Preferably Google
Chrome)
2. Setting up times for 5:59 am so that students see
at 11:59 pm EST in their local time.

Files with longer names Several students across three of my courses are
won’t open. reporting that when they try to open the syllabus,
they get an "Access Denied" response.
Workaround: It is also possible that the length of
the filename for the syllabus may cause this issue.
Filenames cannot exceed 32 characters in length,
including the extension, or they will fail to upload
properly and cause issues like this. Please save the
PDF with a shorter filename and try reuploading it.

Assessment results These are the settings I was hoping to replicate from
don’t allow the BB learn
instructor to show only 1. students take test then see only the items that
incorrectly answered they marked incorrectly
questions. This causes 2. I can proof the test without making it visible to
problems when the students
instructor allows two 3. when proofing the quiz, you will see the same
attempts. feedback Workaround: Recommended using
assessment results settings but they are not detailed
enough

Instructors would like to Some students email to everyone in the class.

disable messages

Receiving “Oops I am unable to view classes it will not load. session

something went wrong” debug log code as follows
notifications frequently. MjMwOTI4L180NTQyM18xLzIubG9n
Workaround: Refresh your browser, sign out, and
sign in to Blackboard again. This is a known issue that
Blackboard sometimes gives such error messages
even if there is no problem. Additionally, to ensure
that Blackboard works as it should, please make sure
that you are using Google Chrome as your browser
(https://www.google.com/chrome) and that you are
on a computer system running a recent version of
either Microsoft Windows or Mac OS. The use of
tablets, smartphones, and other devices can prevent
you from using Blackboard successfully, as can the
use of unsupported browsers or operating systems.

Group members can see When assigning students into lab groups, it appears
the assignment content that with Ultra, only one person in a group can see
simultaneously. the content in an assignment. Is there a way that all
 group members can see the assignment content
simultaneously?
Workaround: Unfortunately, there is no way of
changing this setting. Blackboard designed group
assignments in a way that if someone in the group is
editing, it prevents another group member from
interrupting the attempt/submission.
Does this assignment require a submission to
Blackboard? If not, you may consider replacing the
assignment with a document page and manually
creating a gradebook item in Gradebook to grade
your students. However, this wouldn′t use the groups.
If the lab requires submission to Blackboard and you
want to use groups, you may consider creating an
additional document page with those files attached.
Maybe create a folder and put the
assignment/submission box and document in the
folder.

The instructor cannot The old version used to send email notifications when
subscribe to the a student created a thread or replied by subscribing.
discussion board. Workaround: Subscribing the discussions is not an
option in the Ultra Course view. However, you can
edit the notification settings in the Activity Stream in
Blackboard Base Navigation. This setting is outside of
the course and allow you to decide what kind of
emails you will receive from Blackboard. You can see
this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=_YuXFClGPv0&t=2s

Update all the points on In the old blackboard it was possible to update all the
a test at once. points on a test at once. (Edit test, select all, points,
update/regrade) It appears that Blackboard Ultra
does not have this option and I have to manually add
the point value for each question in a test.
Workaround: Unfortunately, there is no way to
update the point value of all the questions at once.
The only time Blackboard asks to update them all at
once is if you are using a question pool. How it works
is when you create a test, you create it in the
Question Bank first and add the questions. Then
create a test in the content area and pull the
questions from the pool. Since you will be pulling all
the questions at once, it asks how many points each
question will be.

Grade center Items I really need further assistance with the grade center.
(Publisher) My course is integrated with Cengage. Assignments
came over twice and/or was copied over. Long story
short, assignments are in the multiple times and each
time I delete them, they come back.
Workaround: The publisher grading items in the
gradebook can be deleted from the List view.

When I′ve finished grading and enter a grade, it

registers on Grade Book, but the ′New Submission"
notice remains where it is, as if there is a second
post. There isn′t.
Workaround: I have replicated the same in our test
environment and found the grade were saved
improperly. Below are the steps which would be
helpful in grading and the "new submission" would be
cleared.
Admin panel->Open the affected course->Go to
Gradebook->Grid view-> Click new submission which
was already graded by instructor-> It will open the
submission page->Click on the rubric->then Grade
the Rubric by selecting the points->Save and close
the submission panel.
Now you will be able to see the grading status as
completed.
Here is a screen recording of the which I have tested
in our test instance:
https://app.screencast.com/WkPZ9xIn0aojx

My gradebook in DIS4660 is unavailable on my end. I

have reached out to my professor and she can see it
on her end but I can only see Introductions and
Discussion 3 on my end. She has graded Discussion 1
and has posted it and Discussion 2 has also been
posted as well but I cannot see it on me end. I have
attached a file of what I see on my end.
Workaround: The instructor did not post the grade
after the grading was done. I met with the instructor
via Zoom and went over the grading process to make
sure the grading can be viewable by students.

I am having trouble with the gradebook in Ultra. The

assignments appear twice. The shell was copied from
a previous Blackboard shell and there are expired
deadlines, while students as graded as F.
Workaround: After the course copy, you will need to
set the new due dates for all assignments and tests.
If there are duplicate grading items, you will need to
clean those up.

Can′t open student submissions; can′t download

student assignments. Please see attached snip. You′ll
see that I′m in the Gradebook, and that I′ve clicked at
 the top of an assignment to download all of the
student submissions. Nothing happens when I click
anything in the pop-up menu. Nothing happens either
when I click on individual submissions. I have allowed
pop-ups in the browser, but it changes nothing.
Workaround: The Product Development
organization confirmed this issue is a software defect,
but we don’t yet have a target release to deliver the
fix. The next step is to determine the root cause,
required fix, and target release for this bug. We’ll
send you an email when the fix is available in an
upcoming SaaS, Managed Hosting, or Self Hosted
release. The case status may show on Behind the
Blackboard as “Closed”, but you will be updated by
email and through the case when we have more
information. Any related Known Issue article will be
updated with new findings as well. Alternatively, I
create a new course shell and transfer all course
content and students to get the course going.

Discussion Board The client is trying to insert pictures for discussion

board but the images she attached were all
disappeared.
Workaround: The problem has been resolved after
the Product Updates #000068894. Alternatively, she
was able to post images using Adding Images link.

Perusall Placement I have been using the group annotation software

Perusall in my courses for the last few semesters, and
it was enabled in our previous version of Blackboard
as an LTI Tool Provider. When trying to add an
assignment tonight, however, I received the following
Error Message:
Invalid redirect url: https://app.perusall.com/lti/launch
Workaround: The client was using old copy of the
LTI 1.1 link so that she ended up with such error
message. After switching to LTI 1.3, her issue was
resolved.

Sage Blackboard is not working with sage and letting me

register for do my assignments.
Workaround: Sarah Hevey from Sage and confirmed
that our integration of Sage was successful and
working fine. She recommended using the following
document to integrate the Sage course components
into your course. SAGE_Vantage-Blackboard-
Guide_1.3.pdf (268.8 KB). If you have not registered
 your instructor account, please go to
https://vantage.sagepub.com/Login and ′register′ for
an instructor account. Sage will need to do an
approval on their end that will allow you to create
courses but this will get you set up the way you
would like for your account. If you have any
questions, you may directly ask her in the future. Her
contact information is:
Sarah Hevey ([email protected])

Sending Reminders In the old version of bb, when students had not yet
submitted work (e.g. a test), I used to be able to
simply send a reminder to all who did not have the
work done. Today I could not find a simple, succinct
way to do this so I tagged each induvial student in
the gradebook, then I had had to formulate a
message and email it out. And now I have a lot of
emails for every single student cluttering me email. Is
there a simple way to send out mass reminders to a
subset of my class.
Workaround: There is a way you can send out a
notice to students if they have not completed
assignments or tests. There two ways to see whether
the students have completed or not the given
assignments or tests:
1. Go to the content area and click on Submissions
2. Go to grade book and click on the title of an
assignment or test
It will show all the student’s names and their status. If
you have students who need to completely the
assignment or test, you can message them by
checking the checkboxes followed by clicking the
message buttons on the right-hand side.

In Ultra Courses the In Ultra Courses, the Progress Tracking is not marked
Progress Tracking is not for Discussions automatically after students submit a
marked for Discussions response to a Discussion.
automatically.
Workaround: Students may mark the Discussion
complete after opening the Discussion. Alternatively,
the Discussion will be marked "complete" after it has
been graded.
Blackboard notes this feature is functioning as
designed.

In Ultra Courses the In Ultra Courses, the Progress Tracking is not marked
Progress Tracking is not for Web Link course content. Also, the report does not
Marked for Web Links show whether the user accesses it or not. It is not
possible for students to mark web link items as
 complete.

Announcement Email When trying to open an announcement by clicking

gives Invalid Link the link provided in the email, the announcement
Preventing Users to does not open unless "announcement-list" is removed
Access an from the URL.
Announcement
On clicking on the View Announcement button, the
announcement does not open and an error message
stating "Uh-oh. We can't find that page" is displayed.
Workaround: Users may view course
announcements by accessing the Blackboard course
directly. Alternately, remove "announcement-list"
from the URL.

The Discussion Board In the Discussion Board section when the instructor or
Rich Editor is not Saving administrator makes changes in the rich editor, they
Changes Made by are not saved. Once they refresh the page the
Instructors or changes immediately disappear.
Administrators

In Original courses, In Original courses, when students access an

when Students Access assignment in a Learning Module, the submit button
an Assignment in a is not visible unless they zoom out.
Learning Module the
Submit Button is not Workaround:
Visible Unless They Minimize the content tab on the left or zoom out.
Zoom Out

Time Is Up Message In Ultra view mode, if the Respondus Lockdown

Appears for Ultra Exam Browser is enabled for a student with a due date
When Student Has an exception, the "Time is Up" message will appear
Exception and incorrectly.
Respondus Lockdown
Browser is Enabled

Peer Assignment Total Peer review assignments are shown as doubled in the
Points Doubled in Grade Center causing incorrect calculations for the
Overall Grade Overall grade. For example, if the course has a
Calculation possible point value of 50 points, including a peer
review assignment worth 10 points, students' Overall
grade calculations will reflect a point total out of a
possible 60 points.

Students are Unable to In Ultra courses, when creating a hidden Discussion

Access a Previously Board (DB) under a hidden folder as well, once the
Hidden Discussion Board DB's visibility is changed to Release Condition and
the folder's visibility is changed to 'Visible to
students', the DB column remains hidden causing
issues for the students to access it.
 Workaround: The discussion board may need to be
recreated so that students may access it.

Uploading Gradebook When feedback is added or changed while working

Item With Edited offline and then it is uploaded to an Ultra Course, the
Feedback Columns is not changes are not applied in User Interface (UI).
Reflected in the User Instead, they are shown in the downloaded
Interface gradebook column with feedback.

The feedback that was manually added to the

uploaded file can be seen on the latest
downloaded .xls file.

In Blackboard Original In Blackboard Original courses, when trying to attach

courses, File Response a file to a File Response question in a test that is set
Questions Will Not Allow to open in a new window, students are unable to
File to be Attached attach and submit a file. There is no obvious error,
When Test is Set to the file just will not attach.
Open in a New Window
Workaround: In the "Test Information" settings,
ensure that "no" is selected for "Open Test in New
Window."

BB Annotate Displays When using the arrows to move back and forth
Wrong File When between group submissions, from the grade book in
Navigating Between an Ultra course, BB annotate shows up the same
Group Submissions submission for all the groups making it seem that the
Using the Back and groups all submitted the same document. But if the
Forth Arrows in Ultra instructor opens individually each group's
Courses submissions then they can see the correct paper for
each group.
This is only happening to Group Assignments. Bb
annotate works as expected for individual
assignments.
Workaround: Go back to the Gradebook and open
group submissions individually, avoiding using the
arrows.

Selected Text in Bb In Bb Annotate, when a user selects a text from the

Annotate is not second page in PDF and Word documents to
Highlighted From the highlight, it does not get highlighted. Instead random
Second Page characters are being highlighted. This is not
replicable if the text format is aligned to the center,
either with content selected on the first page.
Workaround: There is not an identified workaround
for this issue.

Unable to View Ultra When a student submits an attempt to their

Assessment Submission assessment, the Bb Annotate tool does not display
or Download File in Bb the document's contents and if an attempt is made to
Annotate download the original file, an Access Denied error is
generated.
Workaround: The current workaround is for the
student to be given an exception and to resubmit the
file.
Note: The fix for this issue was deployed
10/26/22. This fix does not retroactively fix previously
impacted submissions. The safest and most efficient
process is for the student to resubmit.

In Blackboard Original, Instructors are unable to create course links to

No Option to Expand the content into subfolders. The option to expand folders
Contents of the Newly is missing.
Copied Folder to Create
Item Course link