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Frequently Asked Questions About Technology

Computer and Internet technology is complex. Conditions change rapidly and without notice. As a result, some of the problems addressed in this section may no longer be problems or the solutions no longer work. Please let us know if any of the information in this section is obsolete or unclear.

After successfully logging into Blackboard, whenever I try to progress from the initial page I receive "Browser Cookies Disabled" error message from Blackboard.

(5/20/2002) Blackboard attempts to help by providing the directions for enabling cookies on the "Browser Cookies Disabled" page. Unfortunately these directions provided by Blackboard cannot be followed for either Internet Explorer 5.5 or 6. There is no Cookies section on the Advanced tab in either of these two versions of Internet Explorer.

It is necessary to have cookies enabled on your browser so that Blackboard can remember you have logged in. What are cookies? (This link takes you to an explanation at another website. Click the back arrow on your browser toolbar to return to this page.)

Here are directions for allowing cookies on the various browsers to which I have access.

If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6:

• Select "Tools" from the menu bar of Internet Explorer
• Select "Internet Tools..." from the "Tools" menu
• Click on the "Privacy" tab near the top of the window that opens
• In the area titled "Settings" is a slide bar. If it is set at "Block All Cookies", then that is the problem.
• Slide the bar down to either "High" or "Medium"
• Click the "OK" button.

If you are using Microsoft Internet Explorer version 5.5

• Select "Tools" from the menu bar of Internet Explorer
• Select "Internet Tools..." from the "Tools" menu
• Click on the "Security" tab near the top of the window that opens
• In the area titled "Select a Web content zone" the "Internet" should be selected.
• In the area titled "Security level for this zone" a slide bar should be displayed. (Click on the "Default" button if text related to custom settings is displayed instead of the slide bar. This could be the problem.) If the slide bar is set at "High", this is the problem.
• Slide the bar down to "Medium."
• Click the "OK" button.

If you are using Netscape Navigator 4:

• Select "Edit" from the menu bar of Netscape
• Select "Preferences..." from the "Edit" menu
• Click on "Advanced" in the Category area of the window that appears.
• If "Disable cookies" is selected, then that is the problem. Select "Accept all cookies."
• Click "OK."

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I have an access key for my Blackboard course. What is that used for?

(5/24/2002) Access keys are different than the username and password required by Blackboard. To maintain privacy, every user of the Blackboard system is assigned a username and password. However, not every user needs an access key.

Access keys are used when the instructor has included materials in his or her course from another source, typically the publisher of the textbook being used in the course. Publishers ensure that users have paid for use of the materials and protect their intellectual property by making students enter an access key. 

For most courses, student access keys are purchased from the book publisher along with other materials for the course at the bookstore. They are normally packaged with new textbooks. For used textbooks, they usually can be purchased separately.

For a few courses, KCC has purchased the access keys for you and they are distributed by the course instructor.

Even if your Blackboard course site uses an access key, you can still get into the courses site without the access key. Without an access key, you can access information within the course that has been created by your instructor. However, the first time you attempt to access the protected information you will be prompted to enter an access key. After entering the access key successfully, you will not need to enter the key again for the duration of the course, even if you access the course from a computer other than the one you used to enter the key.

Blackboard has a help page about the use of access keys on their company site.

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I can't print out some information I need from a Blackboard course site. Help!

(10/24/2002) Sometimes when you print a page from a Blackboard course site using the browser print function only part of the page prints, for example, the navigation frame of Blackboard. (Click here for an definition of frame.) Other possible undesirable outcomes could include a page full of "garbage," or the computer locking up or shutting down.

These problems can be triggered for numerous reasons, but here are a couple: (1) the browser is printing only the active frame and what you want to print is in a different frame, or (2) what you want to print is displayed in the browser using another application, like Word or PowerPoint. 

(1) The easiest solution is to highlight some portion of what you want to print (it doesn't have to be everything you want printed) and then click on the browser print button again. 

Why might this work? Highlighting something in the frame you want printed makes that frame active. 

(2) If that doesn't work, try saving what you want to print and print it from the application. This may be a solution if the information you want to print requires you to click on a link in Blackboard that says something like "Link to file." Instead of clicking on the link the usual way, click on it using the right-hand mouse button. From the menu that appears, choose "Save Target As" or "Save Link As" and save it to the desktop or to a disk. Open this saved file with a word processor or other appropriate application. It should print from the appropriate application with no trouble. 

Why might this work? The browser's print function is only intended for HTML documents, or in other words, web pages. When you see Word, PowerPoint, Adobe PDF documents, etc. in the Blackboard content frame, you are not seeing what the browser rendered, but what some other application rendered in a space provided by the browser. Especially with older versions of browsers, the browser either does not attempt to print the space being used by the other application, or it attempts to print it without being able to properly interpret the various codes in the document used by the application.

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Inside the Blackboard course site, the student roster has a few email addresses listed but not mine. How do I add my email address with my name?

(5/22/2002) To have your e-mail address revealed in the list of students in the Roster area, you first have to make sure your e-mail address is entered into the Personal Information area of the Student Tools section of the course. 

While still in the Student Tools section of the course, go again into Personal Information and select Set Privacy Options. Click the box to the left of the "Email address" choice. Then scroll down and click the Submit button. Your e-mail address will now be revealed to the users who view the Roster listing.

If you cannot do this within a course (instructors can turn "off" the Student Tools area), visit the "my Bb @ KCC" page (it is the tab/link is in the upper left corner of the window). There you will see a Tools area on the left side of the window with a link for Personal Information. You will find a Set Privacy Options there as well.

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(2/4/2002) This generally happens when your dial-up Internet service provider (ISP) drops you during the quiz because of inactivity (an examples of an ISP is America Online). Part of the problem is the way Blackboard distributes the quiz from the Blackboard server on the Internet to your computer. When you request the quiz, Blackboard sends the quiz over the Internet to your computer as a complete file. That ends the communication until you click the submit button to send the finished quiz back to Blackboard. However, you generally require a fair amount of time to complete the quiz. During that time, you may be responding to the questions, but those responses are only being stored in the memory on your computer: they are not being sent back over the Internet to the Blackboard server as you complete each question. As a result, during the time when you are taking the quiz, there is no data flowing between your computer and the Internet. 

Many dial-up ISPs disconnect customers after several minutes of inactivity. 

In addition, you could have the settings on your browser set so it disconnects after a certain period of inactivity (important for those on ISP plans with a limit on the amount of time per month they can use the Internet without additional costs). 

If you are disconnected from the Internet while taking a quiz, the culprit could be either the ISP or the browser dropping your Internet connection. Your reaction to the loss of the connection is usually to close the browser and redial your Internet service provider. You have three problems then. (1) If the instructor has allowed only one attempt to take the quiz, you have had your one attempt and you are now locked out of the quiz. You will have to contact your instructor to have the quiz reset so you can try again. (2) Because the answers are only stored on your computer in memory space assigned to the browser, as soon as the browser was closed, that memory was cleared and all the answers were lost. (If you had not closed the browser, you normally could just redial your ISP and, once the connection is reestablished, click the submit button.) (3) You are likely to take just as long to complete the quiz and be dropped again. 

How to avoid the problem? One step is to make sure the disconnection is being done by your ISP and not your computer. In the dial-up settings on your computer, make sure the setting for disconnecting from the Internet for inactivity is set for a generous amount of time. If that setting is okay, then it probably is the ISP that is disconnecting you from the Internet. To verify, you can call your ISP support to confirm they have such a policy and find out what the time limit is. 

You can avoid having your ISP bump you off the Internet for inactivity by making sure there is periodic traffic between your computer and the Internet. Though your browser will not have any data flowing, another program could be active on the Internet as a background task (computers these days can do more than one thing at a time). 

One program that could be communicating over the Internet in the background is your e-mail client. Setting the e-mail client to check for new messages before the auto-disconnect time elapses is the easiest solution. 

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How do you check grades on Blackboard?

(10/2/2002) Not all instructors use the grade book provided within Blackboard. (Usually the online grade book is used only by those courses that meet 100% online.) If you are in a class where the instructor uses the grade book, from within the course site, click on the Student Tools button in the left-hand frame, then the Check Grade link. If the instructor does not use the feature, the instructor can turn the feature off and it will not appear, so don't be concern if the button or the link is not there.

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My instructor wants me to submit an assignment using the Digital Drop Box in Blackboard. How does that work?

(10/22/2002) There are a couple of similar tools in Blackboard, the Digital Drop Box and the Group File Exchange. The Digital Drop Box is what the instructor usually will have you use to submit work. The Group File Exchange is more frequently used when a small group has to share files among themselves. In the following discussion we are referring to the Digital Drop Box that is accessed from the Student Tools menu.

The Digital Drop Box can be used in a couple of ways.

Add File: Typically you will not use this function. You can use the Digital Drop Box as a remote hard drive. If you are working on an assignment at different locations and don't want to carry the file around on a diskette, you can store it in the Digital Drop Box and have access to it any location that has Internet access. Just click on the Add File button and browse for the file you want to store there. When you use the Add File button, only you have access to the file. The instructor does not. One indicator that a file has been added but not sent is that the date associated with the file will be labeled "Posted on." There will also be a Remove button that allows you to delete the file whenever you want.

Send File: This is the function you will typically use in the Digital Drop Box. The Send File button will submit the file you specify to the instructor. The file will automatically appear in the instructor's Digital Drop Box. (If there is more than one instructor, they all can see it.) On your list of files in the Digital Drop Box, the file you sent to the instructor will have the date associated with the file labeled "Submitted on/by." When sent, there is no remove button to allow you to delete the file. Many instructors will copy the file you submitted to a disk outside of Blackboard and remove the file from the instructor's Digital Drop Box. If the instructor removes the file you submitted from the instructor's Digital Drop Box, then you will see the label associated with the file in your Digital Drop Box view change from "Submitted on/by" to "Received." A Remove button will also appear when this happens. Though you could now remove the file from the Blackboard server using the Remove button, most students will leave it there.

A common mistake is to use the Add File button thinking that submits the file to the instructor. You must use the Send File button before the instructor can see the file.

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My instructor asked me to turn in my assignments as Word document or in rich text format. How do I do that?

(2/12/2003) The assignment seems to assume that you will be using a word processor to create the document needed for your assignment. You did not specify what brand word processor you are using, but most Windows-based word processors work similarly. 

If you are using Microsoft Word as your word processor, when you push the "Save" icon on the tool bar (looks like a diskette), Word will automatically save a newly created document in Word format. 

The alternate file format your instructor specified, RTF (an abbreviation for Rich Text Format), is available on all popular word processing programs. For Windows-based word processing programs, you select "File" from the menu bar, then "Save as." The rest of the process depends on the word processing program. Microsoft Word displays a dialog box that allows you to (1) browse to the desired folder into which to save the document, (2) name the file, and (3) specify the file format ("Save as type"). To save in RTF format, after selecting where to save the document and assigning a name, you'd select RTF from the drop-down menu in the "Save as type" area. Execute the saving of the document by clicking the "Save" button.

The advantage of RTF is that documents can be shared between different brand word processors without much loss of formatting such as typeface, margins, bullet lists, tables, etc.

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My instructor asked me to submit my homework as an e-mail attachment. How do I do that?

(2/12/2003) Be cautious when working with e-mail attachments. Microsoft Word documents attached to e-mail messages are a common way that computer viruses are transmitted. Virus protection software is essential if you plan to work frequently with e-mail attachments.

The process for attaching a file to an e-mail message varies considerably with the type of e-mail system and the software product being used.

Client-server or POP3 systems

Most e-mail clients like Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Outlook Express, or Netscape Messenger have an "Attach" icon on the toolbar (often the icon is a paperclip). The file attachment function is also available either from the "File" menu or the "Tools" menu, depending on which e-mail client you are using. For the file attachment function to appear, you have to be in the process of creating an e-mail message (for example, you will not see the file attachment function when you are reading e-mail or viewing your in-box).

To attach a file to an e-mail message, click on the "Attach" icon or menu selection. The program will display a dialog box. One section of the dialog allows you to browse through the files on your computer to locate the file you want to send. Once you find the file you want to send, select it (highlight it by clicking on it), then click either the "Attach" or "Open" button in the lower corner of the dialog box. The file should now be attached to your e-mail message. Just send the e-mail message as you normally would. A copy of the file will accompany the e-mail to the intended recipient.

Website systems

How file attachments are made will vary even more if you process your e-mail by using a W Web site, such as Hotmail, Yahoo, or KCC's DmailWeb, rather than using an e-mail client as described above. If the e-mail service allows attachments (not all do), either a link or some text boxes for the attachment process should appear somewhere on the screen you use when creating an e-mail message. For example, if you have a KCC e-mail account and use DmailWeb, when you either reply-to, forward, or compose a new e-mail, three text boxes appear below the area in which you type your message. Clicking the "Browse" button next to one of these text boxes opens a dialog box. The top part of the dialog box allows you to look for the file you want to attach. Once you find it, you select (highlight) the file using the mouse, then click on the "Open" button. That attaches the file to the e-mail message you were working on and returns you to the e-mail creation screen. A copy of the file will now accompany the e-mail message when you send it.

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