August 10, 2015

Blackboard becomes unavailable Aug. 15-17

MyUNL Blackboard, the university’s learning management system, will be offline from 8 a.m. Aug. 15 through 8 a.m. Aug. 17 for a planned maintenance event to transition to a cloud environment. Faculty and students will not have access to content or be able to view course documents or syllabi.

While Blackboard is offline, there will be no access to the Blackboard grade center; however, this downtime will not affect access to the MyRed system, and it will still be possible to submit final grades through MyRed.

Once the transfer is complete, there will be minimal changes to the user experience. Course management for instructors will remain the same. All data will be saved during this process, and all course content will remain unchanged. As a general best practice, all instructors are encouraged to archive and/or export their courses to an external computer ahead of the system down time.

MyUNL Blackboard will be offline and unavailable during the maintenance window.

“There’s no convenient time for the system to be off,” said Jeremy Van Hof, learning technologies manager. “But these dates give us a window of time to transfer data, test functionality and ensure consistent service during the semester.”

All faculty were notified of the work via email May 18.

For information about archiving and exporting courses, go to http://go.unl.edu/bbarchive.

For additional assistance, contact the Information Technology Services Computer Help Center at 402-472-3970, toll free at 866-472-3970 or via email at mysupport@unl.edu.