CLIPP Board

Equella update

Apologies for the short notice, but there will be a period of down time for Equella this afternoon from 1500. ISA expects the work will take 30 minutes. This is to increase the storage space available for items in the repository.

Equella Upgrade

ISA will be upgrading Equella, which powers Blackboard’s Resource Centre, on Monday 5th October.

What does this mean for users?

• Users will not be able to upload any items to the resource centre while this is taking place.
• The viewing of resource centre items already added to modules in Blackboard should see little to no disruption.

Why are we doing this?

The new version of Equella brings a number of improvements with regards to adding your content into the resource centre and into your Blackboard modules. Details of which we’ll give when the upgrade is complete.

Update 05/10/2009. Equella has been successfully upgraded to the new version and contribution rights are restored.

Problems Uploading files to Equella: Solution

Until a permanant fix is implemented in Equella, you can continue to use the file uploader if you disable Java’s next-gen plug-in support in the Java control panel. There’s an article on the Java website on how to achieve this. This is only necessary on Windows.

If you are unsure you can contact your school support.

Problems Uploading files to Equella

Update (8th May): A workaround is available

It has been discovered that users are unable to successfully upload files to Equella if they have the latest version of the Java runtime environment installed as their web browser will crash after uploading. You can check if you have the latest version of the Java runtime environment, the only version known to cause problems (at the time of writing) being  ‘Java 6 update 13′ on Windows XP and Vista.

As an interim measure, until a fix is deployed, we have made changes to the upload form in Equella so you can still upload content.

Single Files

Attach files in a similar way to attaching them to an e-mail. Click the ‘Browse’ button to locate your file, and click attach to upload it to the server.

Multiple Files

You can also attach multiple files using this form. If you have several files or need to upload directories of content you can upload them as a ZIP and the server will extract it for you.

If your computer doesn’t have the latest Java Runtime Environment, you can ignore the above method and upload as normal, using the ‘Launch File Manager’ button at the bottom of the form. We recommend that if you are prompted to update Java you postpone it until a fix for this issue is found. If you are unsure or are experiencing problems you can contact your school support.

Equella and the Blackboard building block

Over the last few months we have noticed what one might term to be some “short comings” in the functionality of the Blackboard building block for Equella. For those who have no idea what they are reading about right now Equella is our media repository and the building block is what allows us to place links into Blackboard to material stored within the repository. See the list below for some things that you should be aware of when adding content to Blackboard:

Read more

More ways to manage your content for Blackboard

Lecturers, have you ever published an item on the resource centre, and then later on found that there was a typo or it needed updating? Well, you weren’t alone. We’ve listened and now you can log into the resource centre directly and manage all of your items from the interface there.