Lunch and Learn: Dennis Hood on Blackboard 2011

Black­board

At the Lunch and Learn on April 27th, 2011, Den­nis Hood spoke about what Black­board users should expect from the lat­est ver­sion of Black­board at Prince­ton. He demon­strated the cos­metic and func­tional changes that will come after the upgrade in June. Black­board 2011 offers more straight­for­ward nav­i­ga­tion, tools for increased pro­duc­tiv­ity with less clicks, and a cleaner look and feel.

A few changes were made in order to make the inter­face more friendly. In the new Black­board, your name will again appear at the top of the page when you log in. Black­board removed this fea­ture in the pre­vi­ous release, but it reap­pears in this upgrade. The color of links in the page has been tweaked to improve leg­i­bil­ity. Some peo­ple have reported con­fu­sion in the pre­vi­ous release about the menu-hide and menu-collapse fea­tures, and as a result, the han­dles for these fea­tures have been made more promi­nent. Other changes focused on func­tional changes.

You can now choose to keep announce­ments ordered by a pri­or­ity that you set. There are times in which instruc­tors might want to keep an announce­ment up all semes­ter, and oth­ers which they might only want to keep up for a day, or a week. The changes to the announce­ments area allow you to more quickly arrange, pri­or­i­tize, and dis­miss announce­ments for students.

Hood showed that sig­nif­i­cant changes were made to the con­tent cre­ation tools. The links in the con­tent cre­ation areas, in which instruc­tors can cre­ate links, doc­u­ments, and file down­loads for stu­dents, now has three links for that pur­pose instead of the pre­vi­ous five. The most basic func­tion in the con­tent areas allows instruc­tors to choose to cre­ate an item or cre­ate a file. Cre­at­ing an Item works sim­i­larly to the way it worked in pre­vi­ous releases. Instruc­tors can cre­ate a title, body and attach­ment in an item, and it is imme­di­ately avail­able to their stu­dents, or delayed if they wish. Cre­at­ing a File allows you to sim­ply add a file with­out get­ting the textbox that cre­at­ing an Item presents. Any file you upload to an Item or File page uploaded to a local file to Blackboard’s file stor­age sys­tem.  . When upload­ing con­tent to courses, instruc­tors can choose to browse your local desk­top com­puter or from your course files that they have already uploaded.

Hood had a tip for Microsoft Office users. There is a par­tic­u­larly use­ful fea­ture for peo­ple who use Microsoft Word to pre­pare their course con­tent, such as their syl­labus. In the past, copy­ing and past­ing con­tent from a Word doc­u­ment often meant los­ing for­mat­ting, requir­ing a sub­se­quent clean­ing up of the doc­u­ment, and lost time and effort. There is now a Mashup but­ton with a “Paste from Word” option in the tool­bar that can help you to pre­serve line breaks and other for­mat­ting as you paste it in.

Hood told the audi­ence to be aware of a mis­un­der­stand­ing in Black­board that some peo­ple have reported to him. If an instruc­tor wants to remove an item from a con­tent area, it is impor­tant to click on the con­tex­tual menu next to the item itself. If you click on the remove com­mand in the con­tex­tual menu for the con­tent area at the top of a page, (e.g. Course Mate­ri­als), you will remove the entire con­tent area rather than sim­ply an item within that area.

Hood said that Black­board has greatly improved its abil­ity to deliver files directly to users, rather than as an attach­ment to an Item. In the new ver­sion of Black­board, you can add audio files and images as objects in con­tent areas. Stu­dents can begin to use these files in one click, as opposed to hav­ing to click into a Black­board item, then into the attach­ment. Blackboard’s mashups fea­ture sup­ports the use of var­i­ous exter­nal media sites, such as Flickr and YouTube as a source for course content.

The new Course Files, found in the Con­trol Panel menu, can be pop­u­lated with var­i­ous files such as doc­u­ments and spread­sheets, then browsed, linked to and shared accord­ing to access rules you set up. For instruc­tors who wish to upload a lot of files at once, they need only drag and drop a folder or series of selected files into the course files area. Even if an instruc­tor deletes a link to a file in course files, the file remains in stor­age until it is specif­i­cally deleted from course files. Also when you rename or move a file in course files, all links to it stay intact. For instruc­tors who wish for stu­dents to have a place where they can sim­ply drop files that will be shared with other stu­dents„ they can recre­ate the func­tion­al­ity of a Web­Space Drop­box using course files by set­ting shar­ing per­mis­sions on a course files folder.  This elim­i­nates send­ing stu­dents to a dif­fer­ent appli­ca­tion (Web­Space) for using the shared files folder.

Grade Cen­ter now has its very own top-level Con­trol Panel item. Links to Grade Cen­ter smart views, where fac­ulty can see, for instance, a sub­set of all stu­dents, can now be placed under the Grade Cen­ter link in the Con­trol Panel.  Instruc­tors can quickly see items that require action, such as assign­ments that need grad­ing, with the Needs Grad­ing link. It’s eas­ier to grade blogs, wikis, and jour­nals in Black­board now. Course Blogs allow items to be posted for stu­dent review and com­ment, and Course Jour­nals & Wikis allow stu­dents to indi­vid­u­ally or col­lec­tively write about course con­tent, all of which can be used for assess­ment. Instruc­tors can now cre­ate rubrics to serve as guide­lines for grad­ing assign­ments and essay ques­tions.  These rubrics can be asso­ci­ated in the Grade cen­ter with the items to which they apply. The Grade Cen­ter now allows instruc­tors to grade assign­ments with­out know­ing who the stu­dent who com­pleted the assign­ment is. This can help to pre­vent a pos­i­tive or neg­a­tive bias that the instruc­tor may have acquired about a stu­dent.  Another new and inter­est­ing fea­ture is that an instruc­tor can color code Grade Cen­ter entries in order to high­light cer­tain stu­dents, grades or activity.

Finally, there is a new tab labeled Book Bag that shows stu­dents which books they selected from their course sites to order from Labyrinth. The Book Bag fea­ture is an inter-application rela­tion­ship with Labyrinth Books, and allows stu­dents to order and pur­chase books in Black­board, then sim­ply walk over to pick them up at Labyrinth.

Den­nis Hood explained the ways in which Black­board 2011 at Prince­ton will improve instruc­tor and stu­dent pro­duc­tiv­ity, file man­age­ment, and media con­sump­tion. The inter­face is a bit cleaner and eas­ier to nav­i­gate. The Course Files fea­ture allows for more direct man­age­ment and con­trol of files in Black­board. The Grade Cen­ter allows users to stay bet­ter informed of their recorded progress in courses. Even buy­ing text­books is eas­ier. For more infor­ma­tion, or if you have ques­tions about Black­board at Prince­ton, please con­tact Den­nis Hood at .

Black­board 2011 Quick Start Guide

Audio Pod­cast of the talk