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Friends, As you all know, starting this Fall we will no longer be using Blackboard for course web sites, but the new system, Trunk. If you want a course website, it will have to be created in Trunk, and you should start preparing
now. Trunk has some good features, but in some ways it’s structured differently from Blackboard, many things about it are not intuitive or obvious, and some are downright ugly. Don’t assume that because you know how to
use Blackboard you’ll be able to get your Trunk site up and running the way you want in an hour. And don’t assume that you’ll be able to get help with it during the first week of classes. First, I recommend attending one of the Trunk training seminars. I did, and it was worth it. It’s two hours, and while it won’t teach you everything you need to know, it will get you started, and you’ll learn some useful tricks and tips. Second, if you anticipate needing help setting up your site, please
contact Shannon
to arrange it, and sooner rather than later. Gayle, Jackie, Jean and Shannon all either have attended or will attend one of the training seminars, but they are not experts either (yet), and if all the faculty need help
at the beginning of the semester, they will not be able to manage the extra load. Please do
not go directly to Gayle (or Jackie, or Jean) and ask for help – they will refer you to Shannon. She will be responsible for coordinating the tasks so that the most critical ones get priority and the workload is distributed
equitably. The sooner you start the process, the better your chance of having a working site on Sept. 6. If you wait till September, or even late August, to ask, expect to have to wait. Third, have patience. Maybe this will be like Y2K and it will all go smoothly and quietly, but with several hundred faculty and several thousand students all confronting a new and far-from-perfect
system at the same time, I suspect there will be some chaos in the beginning. Thanks for your cooperation, Roger Roger Tobin Professor and Chair Department of Physics and Astronomy Tufts University 617-627-5461 |