Spaced-OoooO-Out ::

Spent ages going around in circles today trying to upload marks in Blackboard. I’ve just finished marking 80 odd essays, with comments, and wanted to upload this back in to the Grade Book. Easy I thought… I know BB is a bit fussy, so download the marks, add my entries then upload. Didn’t work (note: Firefox just bombs; IE and Chrome work fine). To cut a long story short and help other people who come across the same problem:

• download the marks as a tab delimited file for the specific grade item of interest and make sure you tick “Include comments for this column”
• load in to Excel and copy/paste your marks across (obviously make sure the marks go to the correct students!) and save
• BB seems to like a slightly peculiar form of tab-delimited file where every field is enclosed in quotation marks. This is normally reserved for text fields and neither Open Office or Office97 maintain that. I ended adding these manually (using find/replace) in a text editor
• upload back in to BB but make sure you select tab-delimited. The auto option doesnt work!

Voila! Your marks and feedback should now be in BB.