The Daily Bulletin Archive

Over the last week, there have been reports of “Zoombombing,” a phrase that refers to uninvited guests crashing video conferences to be disruptive.

Here are some suggestions to prevent any unwanted users from potentially joining your Blackboard Collaborate Ultra sessions:

• When creating sessions for your course, consider Adding the Blackboard Collaborate Tool Link to your Blackboard Course and making it visible to your students whenever possible. This enables only the students enrolled in your course to log in to Blackboard and join a session.
• When you do share a Guest Link for sessions you’ve created, avoid making the link public (on a website, for example) in order to limit access to only those for whom the session is intended. A web link in the content area of your course or a direct e-mail would be best.
• Create specific sessions with start and end dates when possible.
• For staff members with separate Blackboard Collaborate Ultra Supervisor accounts, be sure to set your password for access to your account based on our Tips for creating a secure password/passphrases.

When in a session, remember you can do the following:

• Use Session Settings to take away the ability of participants to share their video, share their audio, post in the chat, and draw on the whiteboard and files.
• Watch the Attendee list for uninvited participants.
• Mute all participants from the “More options” icon at the top of your Attendee list.
• Remove individual participants from the session using the Moderator controls icon to the right of individual names in the Attendee list.

For more information, please use the resources listed on our Blackboard Collaborate training page. This page includes video tutorials and includes support for students using mobile apps. This page also presents a link to all IT Knowledge Base articles about Blackboard Collaborate.