This document outlines new features in Service Pack 12 for educators, including an improved calendar, enhanced discussion forums, inline assignment grading, a retention center to help students stay on track, and various test enhancements like availability scheduling and late submission options.
Hi everyone, and thanks for taking a listen to this What’s New session that’s specifically targeted to you, the faculty, instructors and educators that use Blackboard Learn.
I’m going to kick things off with one of the biggest enhancement requests. With this new calendar, you can spend less time organizing your calendar and more time doing what's on it. Consolidate your course items into this easy-to-use calendar. Add events, drag and drop to change due dates, input course reminders, and export to third-party calendars like Outlook or Google.You can see that it’s much more modern, in terms of both look and functionality. Me personally, I’m may go too far in terms of organization, and I love that this new version allows personalization and customization. You can select views (month, week, day) and color-code the events to differentiate courses and personal items. Items with due dates automatically appear on the new Blackboard Learn calendar. If an instructor changes a due date, the calendar gets updated as well. On the flip side, moving a calendar item (by clicking on the item or drag and drop) simultaneously changes a due date for an instructor. Calendar events may be viewed at once– or filtered to show only the desired mix of class and personal events. Users can select which calendars to view, ranging from personal to institution to individual course listings. These calendar items can also be exported via an iCal feed to Outlook, Google or other 3rd party calendars. And
The next tool speaks to engaging the students in the course through Discussions. We took feedback directly from students and instructors, and revamped the look and feel of this feature…all while maintaining the functionality that you valued. The first thing you’ll notice are the large avatars or profile pictures, so it’s a lot easier to identify instructors or classmates. And now you can see all threads on one page, but if this gets overwhelming, you have the ability to collapse and expand them. When you want to reply to a post, you have access to the new content editor – from here you can embed rich media, create a video post and bring your content to life. Or you can keep it simple and post basic comments
And something that instructors and faculty really like is this new post first feature. this forces students to write their own posts before seeing what their classmates have written to encourage critical and original thinking.
Inline assignment grading is a feature that you’ve asked for. Think of the workflow…Now instead of downloading the files that you need to view, edit and grade, you can view the Word, Excel, PPT docs or PDFs “inline” within the Web browser. The various attempts and assignment information is there as well for your referenceAnd right here on the screen, an instructor can comment, highlight, draw free form, add text boxes or cross out text within the document itself. There is no need to download this doc, work outside of the system and then reupload into Blackboard Learn. We’re eliminating several steps to save you time. And imagine the time savings across dozens or hundreds of assignments a semester.
If there’s a rubric associated with the assignment, you can utilize that through the sidebar as part of the grading process And let’s say that you’re meeting with the student during office hours. You can download an annotated version of the assignment – one that has the comments and edits to review in person.
I’ve got probably my favorite Blackboard Learn Quick Hit video to date – the brand new Retention Center. This helps instructors detect problem areas before it’s too late for the student. The new course Retention Center automatically brings attention to student performance and engagement risk factors and quickly triggers alerts. Faculty and instructors can access the Retention Center through My Blackboard, and you can see everything is presented in easy to understand visuals and dashboards. This alerts you to at risk students, shows them the details behind the flags and alerts, and allows them to take immediate action on a student.
And by digging down further into the student level view, you’ll have more detail about missed deadlines, poor performance on grades, inactivity within the course, logins and also the communication history with the student. It also takes just one click to put the student into a watch list and notify advisors, parents, TAs or others you’ve set up in the system. And I our teams really went above and beyond by making this also applicable to instructor performance. Instructors can become more aware of how their own behavior is or isn’t contributing to student success. So the faculty member can see info like Instructor’s last login, Time lag for grading student submissions, Instructor’s participation in interactive components of the course, Recent announcements and how fresh the course content is.
The core capabilities of Tests in Learn are robust, you asked us to address some very specific, yet important, scenarios encountered by instructors. Tests in Blackboard Learn have been updated in response to lthese enhancement requests. First, the user experience of the Test Canvas and Create/Edit pages has been improved to make the process of adding questions more efficient for instructors. It’s easier to create a new question in the desired location with respect to other questions that have already been created. Previously, the instructor would create a question, it would get added to the bottom of the test, and if the instructor wanted to move it, this would be a secondary step after creating the question. The change we’ve included in this release allows the instructor to add a question in the middle of the test exactly where they want it to go, Once on the Create/Edit page, there is also a new option to create another question of the same type without having to go back to the Test Canvas page, as can be seen here:
Today, tests are made available to students by using a combination of link availability, start/end dates, and adaptive release rules. But this approach does not effectively account for the need to have different availability rules for different users, or groups of users – for example, for certain students with disabilities who might need more time to complete a test.To address this need, a new rule-based method for adding availability “exceptions” to tests has been added to the Test Options page. Using this new capability, instructors may select one or more group or user, and make a number of exceptions to the already established delivery settings for other students. Specifically, the exceptions that can be made for users or groups are:Number of attemptsTime of testAuto submit on/offAvailability start & end dateForce completion on/off
The best way to show you the value of the granular feedback control is to to outline the “before” situation. If an instructor wanted to make the Score available to the students immediately after submitting a test, but not release the submitted answers, correct answers, and feedback until after the due date of the test, the instructor would need to remember this and visit the Test Options page twice – making a setting change each time – to achieve this result. Instructors wanted an automated and scheduled way to achieve this kind of result, especially in order to keep test questions secure to help prevent cheating.We’ve implemented a new event-based method for releasing test feedback and added additional feedback options to provide instructors with more control over what kinds of feedback students can or can’t see. Now events can be specified to trigger specific feedback settings. Two events can be created to change the feedback that is displayed over time.
There are some other…A new setting has been included for test Due Dates that allows the instructor to decide if the student can take a test after the test Due Date has passed:When late submissions are allowed by the instructor, we have also added several indicators that will make it easier for instructors to identify late submissions. These include the Needs Grading view, view all attempts page, review test submission screen and the grade details.
