We are currently completing a full audit of all Blackboard courses, and are looking for a quick way to find out which courses have used interactive tools. We're looking to report on whether each course has actively used blogs, journals, discussion boards or wikis in the last year, and are concerned that doing a manual audit will be time consuming, and could result in missed tools if they're hidden in sub-folders.
Does anyone have a database query which would work on our MH environment that would list the courses which have used these tools, and the number of entries this academic year? We have some queries used for a similar purpose from a number of years ago when we were self-hosted (on MSSQL), but we're looking for a way to do this now that we're on Managed Hosting (on Linux and Oracle). Any suggestions would be gratefully received.
Hi Chris, you could take a look at Szymon Machajewski's bbstats building block which has a tool adoption section that might get you going quickly. See GitHub - OSCELOT/BbStats: BbStats reports data on LMS tool adoption. It also tracks concurrent sessions on the system a… and Blackboard BbStats - Adoption Report: How to analyze and test the data - YouTube
left join (select crsmain_pk1, listagg(to_char(u.lastname), ',') within group (order by u.pk1) as faculty
HAVING COUNT(cu.pk1) > 3) -- comment out this line if you don't care about student count being over 3
Matt - great idea to look at BbStats - I already have that installed on our live system. I've watched the YouTube video, but can't see how you filter the report down to an individual course. Do you use this? If not, any pointers from Szymon Machajewski would be tremendous!
Chris Bray - thanks so much for sharing Brett Stephens's query - I've tried it on my self-hosted test system running on a windows box (MSSQL) and it's complaining about a few bits of the syntax including the ALTER SESSION and NVL parts - do you know if they're Oracle commands? I'm OK with the basics of MSSQL, but am by no means an expert so please excuse the questions!
It's a bit tricky to troubleshoot without full access to the database (and with almost no Oracle knowledge!) - do you know what the query should give us? If I know it's going to provide the information we're looking for, I can ask the MH team to run the query directly on the database on the back end.
Hey Chris, at the moment I'm just running the query via the Support Tools Building Block, which I think is very much not a supported route! We had OpenDB on a one year trial, but I think it may have expired; I'm just checking with my account manager if we still have this. Alternatively, I think we can request queries to be run via Behind the Blackboard - would you expect Brett's query above to work if I sent it over to the MH team to run on the back end?
Yes I don't think you can then filter down to get results per course, but it will show courses per faculty/dept (or however your course catalogue is set up).
Chris Boon Great to hear you'll try BbStats! In configuration of the B2 you can set course_id pattern. If you specify a specific course_id, the reports will show a single course. The config is used to show courses based on course_id pattern, like 2018.spring, for all courses in that semester.
Hey Szymon Machajewski, thanks so much for this - I can now see where the course ID filter is. I've successfully filtered for our standard courses which all start with a course ID of BCC ("Blackboard Course Creator"), and for a specific course.
This looks really useful, and we love the data on the current most active users, but in this situation I'm looking for the number of blogs, journals, wikis, discussion boards, including the number of posts in the last academic year as many of course courses are used across multiple years. I can see that your excellent tool reports on the number of Bb tools in a course, but it looks like the totals for Wikis, Blogs and Journals are all listed together, and I think it's reporting discussion board forums when Groups have been added to a course. I'm sure BbStats will be useful for part of our audit, but I've a feeling our needs around interactive tools are rather too specific so will need a query.
Yes, the level of detail is often where the Devil is buried. When you do come up with the query you need, please post it to this thread so we can consider adding it into BbStats.
This is an excellent questions. I believe you need to inquire with support as it may depend on your level of service. A new REST API version of BbStats is in development, so at some point the question of being allowed to run BbStats on your system won't be the main question.
Unfortunately, BbStats is not compatible with SaaS, regardless of service level or upgrade options. The incompatibility seems tied to a few queries that don't work with PostgreSQL. I just tested version 4.1.2 and while the dashboard page started to load it quickly failed with "ERROR: column "sysdate" does not exist"
The particular report specific to the topic of this post, The Adoption Report (bbstats_Adoption.jsp), was among the failures.
I tried a few of the other JSPs too with similar results. PostgreSQL handles dates differently than Oracle and MS SQL. Most of the errors seem related to those differences.
I'm finding BbStats very helpful, but we're having difficulty filtering by a course ID string. All of our course IDs are numeric, containing a five digit course number followed by a decimal, then a six digit semester code. For example:
I can't seem to pull LMS Adoption Data by term, as every iteration I've tried of 201803 in the "User activity in courses with specific Course ID pattern" box results in either zero or four courses data listed. I've tried using decimals in front, Boolean wildcards, and truncated numbers, but nothing seems to work. What am I doing wrong?
I couldn't get this to pass a smoke test on my SaaS test deployments. Seems like the JSPs still think this is Oracle. (Same sysdate errors)
Jeff Kelley Ok, it was late last night, and I didn't include any instructions. Please go to config and change from Oracle to Saas in the db configuration. Soon I'll get this to detect the environment instead of having to set it ...
And I was up waaay too early. I will work to get this added to the SaaS inventory so folks need only ask Support to have it installed.
Thanks to all for the updates. I am able to get BB Stats 6 to work on my SaaS Test server, but it is giving an error on my production server. I am getting the same error previously mentioned:
Anyone have any ideas why it would act differently on the two servers? (We are on continuous delivery and I thought that might apply - however, Test is on the latest version and Production is one version behind our test server.) Thanks for any insights!
Karly - that is an indication that you haven't updated the settings of the building block so it knows it is on SaaS. The default setting is Oracle. Go to the Building Block -> Settings and update from Oracle to SaaS. (Thanks to Szymon for pointing this out to me last month.)
Yes, you're right. The link was to a specific war file. my bk experience This is the kroger feedback project link:
After changing the settings to SaaS, I have gotten a lot of data out of our system for tool usage. This has been wonderful. However, I cannot get any report from the LMS Adoption Report > for 4. Course Content Items or 5. Course Availability. It is actually giving me an error. Do I have another setting incorrect?
Also, I wanted to share your blog post that uses the data from BBStats with those who commented on this community space. It is a great resource!
With the new calendar feature I thought it would be good to create a list of great resources for finding or creating your own hex colors to use with the calendar.
There are several great web services that allow you to create your own hex colors or find ones that others have created. In the example below I am using Adobe Color (formerly Kuler). Adobe Color allows users to create color palettes by using the color wheel. What you want to look for is the hex number for the color. Copy that and then go to Canvas and paste it in the option to set the color for a course in the calendar.
I like to direct people to this little utitlity if they need to know what color = what hex code: http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_colorpicker.asp
Great resources. We have done a lot of customizing for our institutions branding and we relied heavily on the following color sites:
Nice write-up, Susan! I'm going to share your posting with our own school group here in the Community!
I was recently introduced to Sip which is a Mac app with both free and Pro ($9.99) versions. I have found quite handy to either pull the hex of a color or to store our approved institutional branding colors as hex values that I can quickly reference.
I want to use QoS DSCP Assured Forwarding in my network based on a QoS policy that will match packets based on an ACL, remark the DSCP value and assign to a queue. The default queue is WRR, and although for example DSCP AF31 maps to dot1p-3, which maps to a local precedence of 3 and therefore schedules the packet to WRR queue 3, I have to manually remark the packet to local precedence 3 else it won't be scheduled in output queue 3.
However, as the Assured Forwarding model contains drop preferences within each class, so that AF11 has a lower drop preference than AF13, the priority is not recognised because both are put in queue 1. I would like to use WRED, which is a congestion avoidance mechanism that utilizes drop preferences.
When I create a WRED table globally, the table type is "queue" based and the default table does not distinguish amongst the queues and drops preferences, they are all the same so I have to configure them.
Does this mean that, when the WRED table is configured, if I remark a packet as AF11 and remark local precedence as 3, then do the same for a packet AF13,and then use WRED, that AF13 packets will be dropped before AF11 packets? Therefore WRED is DSCP based in that it inherently recognises that AF13 needs to be dropped before AF11?
MAP Reading Fluency tests are available in two types: Foundational Skills and Adaptive Oral Reading.
Foundational Skills assesses letter-sounds fluency, initial sound fluency, letter knowledge (letter ID or letter naming), listening comprehension, and vocabulary. There is no oral reading. If students demonstrate enough ability in earlier sub-tests, there may also be silent word and sentence reading.
Grade-specific Adaptive Oral Reading is an adaptive test beginning with an oral reading task and several timed silent reading sub-tests. It then branches either to Foundational Skills or to the student orally reading 3 passages, each containing 6 comprehension questions.
See the attached document for a flowchart showing how the test proceeds based on the student's performance.
For newly added students or at the start of a new term, MAP Reading Fluency auto-assigns the Adaptive Oral Reading test. This can be changed from the Assignments tab if needed.
The foundational skills assessment is an adaptive assessment testing skills such as letter-sounds fluency, initial sound fluency, letter knowledge (letter ID or letter naming), listening comprehension and vocabulary. Depending on how a student performs on particular skill, they will advance to a more or less difficult skill, so they may not be assessed in all of the available skills. If the student performs well enough on this assessment, they may advance to a segment assessing sentence reading fluency.
First, the student reads a 50-word picture book aloud and completes a timed sentence-picture matching task to assess basic comprehension skills. If the student passes the sentence-picture matching task, the student is presented with 3 passages to read aloud and answer questions about. If the student fails the sentence-picture matching task, the student is routed to the Foundational Skills assessment instead.
This is automatic for all operations. If the tool axis for the operation would force other B/C angles, they will be output as needed.
2) Specific operations: Use the "Rotate" UDE. Note the tool axis must be in a position where this will work.
Is the data on the Documents and Users tab in QEMC (under Status -> QVS Statistics) available from the new management api in QlikView 10? I've looked at the wsdl but there isn't any api that will return the list of users currently using which documents. If anyone knows if the data is available, please let me know.