As part of the recent upgrade of the Virtual Learning Environment, there has been a significant but unexpected change to the Virtual Classroom and Chat tool set in our instance of the VLE.  Blackboard had taken the decision to deprecate the old versions of Virtual Classroom and Chat  in favour of Blackboard Collaborate Ultra; a new and more secure collaboration tool.  As part of the upgrade - the old version of chat and Virtual Classroom have been removed from our service.

It was our intention to roll out the new version of Blackboard Collaborate in the next Semester but delaying this was  no longer an option for us and staff and students will now have to use Blackboard Collaborate Ultra.

Information on how to use this service can be found here.  Support and assistance with this transition should be directed to UHI Service Desk in the first instance at servicedesk@uhi.ac.uk or Telephone 01463 279150.

We appreciate that change in the middle of Semester is not ideal but to maintain a secure and effective Learning Environment it is important that we follow the upgrade pathways provided by the service provider. 

We have an option to recover stored chat sessions by restoring module spaces and extracting a transcript of chat in word document format. If you require any of your chat sessions to be recovered then please log a call with the UHI Service Desk listing the Module Title, Module Number and Chat sessions you require.