I am taking an online course that utilizes Blackboard. The headings and titles of many sections of the course include this string of characters:
&νβσπ;
This course is taught entirely in english, and does not study foreign cultures, so I don’t think it’s foreign writing. Sometimes that string is repeated four or five times before the real title of the section. What does it mean?
It means someone screwed up.
The six-character HTML entity " " represents a non-breaking space character. What you have is the same thing with the letters replaced with corresponding Greek letters (nu, beta, sigma, pi). How that happened I have no idea. I can think of a few plausible scenarios, but all involve someone doing something wrong.
It is the HTML entity (non-breaking space) which has been fantastically mangled by broken character encodings somewhere along the line.
The sequence νβσπ appears to be the Unicode codepoints associated with the glyphs in the “Symbol” font when you type the string “nbsp”.
I addition, I would point out that if these are showing up before headings and titles, then it probably means that non-breaking spaces were being used for indentation before they were mangled. This is an HTML wtf even at that stage as things like that should be handle thorough style sheets.