Blackboard is a course management system used at Athens State University to provide online access to course materials for every course we offer, including traditional, distance, teleconference, and blended courses. • All active students have already been assigned a Blackboard account. To access your account, please use your full My Athens email address and your PIN from your ASU Online account to log into Blackboard. • Blackboard can now run on Internet Explorer 8 or higher. If you do not have the latest version of Internet Explorer installed on your PC, it is recommended that you do so. Blackboard no longer requires FireFox to run. • Student access to course work posted on Blackboard begins on the first day of the term as published in the printed schedule on a per-course basis (weekend & half-term courses have different start dates than full-term courses). Early entrance to your courses is not possible. • Changing your PIN in your Web for Students account is not instantaneous and could take up to 3 days to take effect in Blackboard, as this program only runs during ASU business hours, three times daily Monday thru Friday. • If you are attempting to connect from behind a firewall, you must allow access to ports 7755 and 8081 in order to use Blackboard and its chatting features. • To avoid access problems with any of our online services, you should add the following URLs to your browser's list of trusted sites: athens.blackboard.com athens.tegrity.com athens.wimba.com athens2.wimba.com www.respondus.com www.smarthinking.com • If you use America Online to connect to the Internet, do not use AOL's browser to log into Blackboard. You must minimize AOL after you're connected and launch Mozilla Firefox to login. AOL's browser will almost definitely prohibit your Blackboard access to one degree or another.