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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Mar
26
(2009)
Blackboard Learn on iPod Touch
Filed under: work. Tags: blackboard, ipod touch, mobile learning.
I tried the promising new iPhone / iPod Touch app “Blackboard Learning” hoping to have a cool and efficient way to connect to Blackboard from my pocket computer. No such luck. There’s always something in the way of making the LMS experience fun…
Error
Your institution is blocking Sync for the iPhone.
Doh.
I don’t know if this is a version mismatch – are we running the wrong version of Blackboard? – or if it’s just a new building block that needs to get rolled out on campus. Either way, frustration.
I tried it on TRU’s Blackboard site and it failed as well. Says TRU’s site is actually WebCT Vista and that is not supported.
See http://www.blackboardsync.com/. Your institution must be explicitly blocking it. I would guess that they haven’t installed the new building block which gives institutions more control over what to enable, and they are blocking it using a text file:
http://your.institution.edu/webapps/bbsync-block.txt (iirc)
This is because the first application to use Sync was Facebook and many institutions weren’t comfortable with it, so they blocked it using the text file approach. The new building block makes it much more feasible, but it just came out, so not many institutions will have installed it yet.
follow-up on that url:
http:///webapps/blackboard/bbsync-block.txt
Looks like it’s tied to the Sync platform – which our IT dept. rightly refused to adopt because of the data leakage and privacy implications of using a US-located server as a bridge into our LMS. I hope that’s not an issue with the current Sync system, so the iPhone/iPod app can be used. Bb is a world of pain on mobile devices at the moment.