We apologize for any inconvenience that this outage will cause. If you have any questions or concerns about the outage, please contact us at elms@umd.edu.

- ELMS Support Staff

Offering a Smarter Blackboard Grade Center(TM)
The newly redesigned Gradebook now enables teachers to focus on teaching, not data entry. New features include in-cell editing, grading periods, smart views, and progress reports.

Facilitating Self and Peer Assessments
Self and peer assessment features help facilitate student group work for faculty. Self Evaluation enables students to review and grade their own assessments by following criteria set by their instructor. With Peer Evaluation, students can review work submitted by their peers using specific criteria, compare their responses, and offer constructive criticism.

Managing Digital Content Easily with the Blackboard Content System
Enhancements in this release include: Reusable Objects (allows faculty to create and then reuse content) and 360 Degree View (conveniently summarizes file information, such as where it is linked, URL, etc.)

For more information about these new features, view our faculty What’s New document.

The OIT Learning Technologies group

You will see a link for requesting a quota increase under the Tasks menu area. This feature is available to faculty and organization leaders. If you are interested in training or have any questions, please contact elms@umd.edu.

We will be releasing the final version of this new page in January but a beta version of this page is already available. To access the beta version, go to the current request page and select the link to the beta version on the top.

Note: You can submit requests for your Winter 2008 and Spring 2008 courses either through the current course request page or using the new page.

If you have any questions, please contact the ELMS Support Staff(elms@umd.edu).

Workshops focus on a variety of technology applications in a hands-on, instructor-led environment and include:

• What’s New with ELMS 7.3, January 7, 22 OR 25
• ELMS 7.3 (powered by Blackboard Academic Suite)
• Getting Started with ELMS, January 7 OR 15
• Managing Content and the Content Collection, January 9 OR January 18
• Managing the Gradebook, January 9 OR January 15
• Collaboration and Communication, January 10
• Assessment and Evaluation, January 10
• Wikis in the Classroom, January 14
• Teaching with Wimba Live Classroom, January 14

Register for workshops at www.training.umd.edu (Course Catalog, OIT Institute for Instructional Technology) at least 3 days before the workshop date. See the course calendar at www.oit.umd.edu/iit/calendar.html for times.

ELMS [http://elms.umd.edu] (Powered by Blackboard) is currently available to the university community.  Although the root cause of  the outages has been identified by the Blackboard engineers at the off-campus Blackboard hosting site, the specific module that is causing the problem has not been identified.  The system has been stabilized by turning off several modules that may have caused the   outages.  ELMS support staff will be working with the Blackboard engineers next week to begin determining which module is causing problems.

Until the correct module is identified, users will note that the What’s New module is not available to them when they log into the ELMS environment.  In addition, instructors will notice that the section and course columns will have information in them, but they will not be updated on a daily basis with any changes that may have occurred the day before.

We apologize for the inconvenience the outages have caused. We will continue to post updates on the system status at this Web site.

Thank you for your patience in this matter.

ELMS Support

An update will be posted when the system becomes available.

Thank you for your patience in this matter.