What's New in Blackboard
for both Instructors and Students
by Chris Collins
Welcome to a new school year! Over the summer, the Blackboard Support Team has been busy, upgrading the Blackboard software and creating new and improved services to enhance your teaching and learning experience. If you are returning from summer break, you will be pleased to find new tools and supporting documentation to continue your work in Blackboard. If you are a new instructor, please visit our support site at http://blackboard.uc.edu/support to learn about all the things you can do with the Blackboard software.
What's New in Blackboard?
Software Upgrades Bring New Features
Blackboard has been upgraded to version 6.1 with Application Pack 2. These upgrades have introduced many new software features and significant bug fixes to the previous version. Some of the new features include the following:
- Spell Check and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor:
Text boxes in Blackboard are now equipped with a word processor type toolbar that allows you to spell check your text and choose different fonts, colors, text sizes, and more.
- Quick Edit:
Instructors can now make changes to course content from within the student view of a Blackboard course. The "Edit View" link appears in the upper right corner of all screens in the student view (to the right of the bread crumb trail).
- Quick Tool Linking:
You can now add communication tool links to any area of your course, including direct links to specific discussion board forums. From the Control Panel, enter one of the content areas of your course and click the "Add Course Link" button. Then click the "Browse" button to open a map of your course content, and choose the item you wish to link to by selecting the appropriate radio button.
- New Assessment Features:
Many new options are available in the testing and survey features of Blackboard, including the ability for students to save their answers as they go through a test. We highly recommend that instructors who use the Assessments feature in Blackboard read our new "Using Assessments in Blackboard" Best Practices Guide before using these new test options. See below for more information about our new "Best Practices" guides.
- Download Test and Survey Responses:
Instructors can now download the results of tests and surveys to perform statistical analysis with third party software applications. Enter the Gradebook and click the name of the test or survey at the top of the column. Then choose "Download Results" in the following menu and click "Submit."
- My Courses Module:
In previous versions, only courses that were Available to students could be selected or de-selected from the My Courses box. The recent upgrades resolve this issue, so a user can better customize his or her course list, but this new feature only works for instructors and students of a course. TAs, Course Builders, and Course Graders cannot de-select a course in the list. Instead, they must request that the instructor of record remove them from a course to have the entry disappear from their My Courses module.
- Glossary:
Now an instructor can create a course specific glossary of terms in his or her Blackboard course site. The tool can be found in the Control Panel under the "Glossary" link in Course Tools.
- Report Card Module:
A new module on the My UC page allows a student to aggregate all of the grades in his or her Blackboard courses into one convenient location. If the instructor of a course does not use the Gradebook in Blackboard, the grade for that course will be blank in the Report Card module.
New Visitor Account Request Tool
In addition to implementing the new features mentioned above, the Blackboard Support Team has been hard at work custom coding new tools to improve our services. Instructors may now request up to 25 "Visitor accounts" per course, for individuals who need access to a Blackboard course site but who are not registered students or University employees. Visitor accounts are ideal for guest lecturers, colleagues from other institutions, or non-paying senior citizens who are participating in a course. Visitor accounts have full student access to the course site for the duration of the course. When the course is completed, the Visitor accounts will expire and be removed from the Blackboard system.
Under no circumstances should a Visitor account be requested to bypass the normal data integration process for a UC student, staff, or faculty member. Students and employees of the University will have accounts created for them automatically as they register for classes or are entered into the employee system. The Visitor Account Request Form should only be used to request accounts for individuals who are not registered students or University employees.
An instructor must provide the full name and a valid email address for each account holder. To request accounts, enter the Control Panel for the course or organization in which the accounts will be enrolled and click the "Request Visitor Accounts" link in the Course Tools area. The request will be processed within one to two business days.
New Download Roster Tool
Another feature custom coded by the UCit Blackboard Support Team is the "Download Roster" link that now appears in the Course Tools area of the Control Panel. This convenient link allows you to download, to an Excel file, the first name, last name, username, and email address of each user enrolled in your course. (Alternatively, you can copy and paste the text from the screen into other applications.)
Blackboard "Best Practices" Series Announced
As the Blackboard software becomes more robust and flexible, it also becomes more complicated. Blackboard Support Team members have distilled their experiences assisting thousands of faculty and students into a series of "Best Practices" guides for a number of Blackboard tasks. These guides will help you avoid common problems, learn about bugs in the software before they bite, and take advantage of some of the great tools that Blackboard has to offer with easy to follow, step-by-step directions.
The first round of "Best Practices" guides includes the following:
- Using Assessments in Blackboard
- Using the Assignment Manager in Blackboard
- Using Multimedia in Blackboard (Coming Soon!)
- Using the Gradebook in Blackboard (Coming Soon!)
Download or print these compact guides from our support site at http://blackboard.uc.edu/support. From the Instructor menu, select "Tips and Documents" to view the available guides.
Do you have a suggestion for another "Best Practices" guide? Send email to give us your feedback!
Blackboard Basics & Beyond 2nd Edition Now Available
The newly released Blackboard Basics & Beyond 2nd edition includes updates on browser requirements, assessment features, and the assignment manager. This manual is perfect for the instructor who has never used Blackboard before or someone who is just getting started with basic course building tasks. This guide, written by the UCit Blackboard Support Team, has been adopted by a number of other institutions and is even spotlighted on Blackboard.com's corporate site!
Find out what all the fuss is about by downloading your own copy from http://blackboard.uc.edu/support (Instructor -> Blackboard Documents), or send email to blackboard@uc.edu to request a hard copy. We can only send to locations on campus; please include include your Mail Location in your request.
The Blackboard Support Team is committed to providing excellent customer service and technical support for our customers - and we wish you the very best in the upcoming academic year.
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