Check Junk Folder Regularly

Some “good” mail may be intentional delivered to your junk folder, and some junk may be delivered to your inbox. By labeling messages as “junk” and “not junk” users can train their mailbox to recognize what’s junk and what isn’t.

myBama, Banner and Other Services Unavailable Sunday, July 11

OIT will install the quarterly Oracle patch on Sunday, July 11, from 4:00 a.m. until 10:00 a.m. The following services will be unavailable during the installation period: Appworx, BITPRD, Banner, CEME, CENSUS, Crystal Report Server, Degree Works, myBama, OIRA, PCR360 and SiteFile. If you have any questions or concerns, contact the IT Service Desk at 205-348-5555 or itsd@ua.edu.

Flipgrid to Replace VoiceThread

Flipgrid is available to UA students, faculty and staff. Flipgrid offers a modern, fun and accessible video discussion option for UA instructors and students, ideal for engaging students asynchronously.

By using Flipgrid, instructors can increase feelings of social connections and community among students while providing students with the opportunity to develop their voices. All UA students, faculty and staff have access to Flipgrid through UA’s Microsoft license agreement.

Flipgrid can be embedded in a Blackboard Learn course or viewed from a browser or the Flipgrid app, which is available on mobile devices. Instructors can create welcome videos with the tool, and students can use it for presentations. Instructors can create Flipgrid assignments and allow students to…

  • Verbalize their thinking process
  • Create and deliver short how-to videos
  • Create or participate in a digital video scavenger hunt
  • Verbalize goals or reflect
  • Provide digital or oral reading responses
  • Collaborate on projects
  • Provide feedback through peer reviews
  • Summarize and highlight student work or discussions
  • Plus, so much more!

Get started with Flipgrid at flipgrid.com. Click the Educator Sign up button and choose to login with a Microsoft O365 account. Enter your myBamausername@ua.edu email address, or Crimson email address, and password to sign in. More information and guides for using Flipgrid is available on the CIT website.

UA is transitioning to Flipgrid as our video discussion and collaboration tool. Effective for the Fall 2021 semester, VoiceThread will no longer be available to UA students, faculty and staff. If you previously used VoiceThread for recorded lectures, you can export that content and upload into Panopto, then share it as a link in Flipgrid. We have step-by-step instructions on how to export VoiceThread content on the CIT website.

Blackboard Clean Up

Beginning July 15, the Center for Instructional Technology will remove old course content from the Blackboard Learn system. This is accordance with UA’s LMS Course Retention Policy, which states that materials more than two years old will be removed from the system. Students and instructors should save any materials they wish to keep.

How to Back Up Blackboard Content – Students
At the end of each semester, students should save anything they may want to keep. Courses will be made unavailable according to the LMS retention policy but can also be made unavailable by the instructor any time after a course is completed. Visit the CIT website for guidance on how students can back up Blackboard content.

How to Back Up Blackboard Content – Instructors
Instructors have several options for backing up content or copying content into another course. More information about each of these options is available on the CIT website.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact CIT at 205-348-3532 or cit@ua.edu.

OIT to Remove Access to Crimson Gmail

Effective Tuesday, June 8, OIT will no longer allow users with Crimson email accounts to access Crimson email at gmail.com. Crimson accounts must be accessed in O365 at mail.crimson.ua.edu.  After June 8, if users attempt to access their Crimson email account in Gmail, they will receive the following error message.

access email in O365

Gmail not enabled

The Outlook mobile and desktop app is also available, visit our Crimson email webpage for more information.

Crimson Email Migration Update

More than 130,000 Crimson email accounts have been migrated from Gmail to Microsoft O365. This includes incoming and future UA students, currently enrolled students, and alumni.

Students can visit mail.crimson.ua.edu to access their Crimson email accounts. Note – two-factor authentication is required for email access. Future and current students should use Duo two-factor authentication, and alumni should use Microsoft multi-factor.

More information about the migration, including step-by-step guides for adding a Crimson email account to Outlook mobile and desktop apps, is available on our website. If students or alumni experience any issues accessing their email accounts, they should change their password.

Courses to be Removed from Blackboard

In accordance with UA’s LMS Course Retention Policy, materials more than two years old will be removed from the Blackboard Learn system. The Center for Instructional Technology will begin removing content from the LMS on July 15. Instructors can export course content, copy content to another course, and request a course shell to copy content from an existing course. Visit the CIT website for more information.

Microsoft Forwarding Rule – Impacted FA Email

Wednesday, May 26, Microsoft deployed a spam rule that prevented email from auto-forwarding. This service interruption impacted all @fa.ua.edu email accounts that have been migrated to the UA Microsoft tenant. Microsoft has determined the cause and implemented a fix.

Brief Service Interruption – May 4

Root Cause Update, May 5: 

During routine data center maintenance, a default configuration was inadvertently applied to several ports causing devices connected to those ports to have difficulty connecting to the network. This caused an outage for some campus services, including myBama.


The outage was immediately identified and remediated. Moving forward, this maintenance will be vetted by multiple teams within OIT to minimize impact.

May 4, a network switch in the OIT data center lost connectivity and caused a brief service interruption for a few campus services.

myBama was unavailable for approximately 30 minutes; however, the myBama maintenance page was up, allowing instructors to reach Banner self-service for final grade entry. Our teams are investigating the root cause of the switch network outage, and it will be posted to here when available.