Guests & Identities

Sponsored guests on Blackboard

Faculty members who would like to add guests from outside UNL to their My.UNL (Blackboard) courses will follow a new procedure beginning May 15.

The new process is designed to provide better security and to protect access to student work and grades.A UNL faculty or staff member will sponsor a guest by entering guest information at http://login.unl.edu/guests

"With the old method, around 14 percent of the accounts that have instructor-level access to a course on My.UNL are manually created, so we don't have a good way to connect them with a real person behind the account," said Paul Erickson, academic technology and middleware coordinator for Information Services. "These accounts have instructor-level access to grades, student work, etc., but there is no real accountability to know where they came from or who is using the account. We have Family Educational Rights and Privacy guidelines to follow. This change will allow the university to provision and de-provision guest services more effectively."

The new procedure will also benefit guests by assigning them a single identity across the system with a single login (the guest's email address) and password. Guests will be allowed access for six months. A sponsor may renew a guest account for another six months before requiring registration into SAP as an affiliate.

The naming convention by which students log in to My.UNL will also be changing. Beginning May 15, new students will get logins with the same name/number convention as faculty/staff accounts.

"We're eliminating the "s-" prefix beginning with new student logins," said Erickson. "Blackboard will begin to recognize the individual for the multiple roles they may have."

Usernames for existing students using an "s-" account will not change.

Until now, UNL faculty and staff who are also taking courses have had to use a separate student login for their coursework. Starting May 15, all new courses faculty/staff are taking or teaching will be assigned to their faculty/staff accounts. The old "s-" student accounts will stay on the system but only for archival access, no new courses will be assigned to these old accounts. My.UNL will grant them all appropriate access under that login.