Blackboard has been upgraded
The upgrade to Blackboard has finished earlier than we expected, which means it’s now available again to everyone. There are a few new features that we’d like to highlight.
New Icon Set
The look and feel of Blackboard has not changed much in last few years which is why we’re excited about this small change. The new icons will show up in your content areas and the Tools section.
New Icon Set
Drag and Drop submissions
This simple tool allows students to drag and drop their assignments onto the submission page. A black dashed line will show them the hot spot where they can drop it. This will also work when attaching files to content areas for instructors as well.
Hot spot for drag and drop
Submission Receipt ID numbers.
Much like when you buy something online you will get a receipt ID number. Now this option is available to students when they submit an assignment. At the moment this ID number will only appear when they submit an assignment, students won’t be emailed it.
This is particularly helpful for a student who has submitted an assignment but that hasn’t shown up in the grade centre.
What the students will see when they submit an assignment.
These ID numbers can be found by the instructor in the Grade Centre. Under the Reports tab, there will be an option of Submission Receipts. Here you can search by username and find the receipt number the student has given you to confirm their submission of an assignment.
Bug Fixes
We’ve also added an array of bug fixes including:
- Course Reports should now run as usual
- Last Access in the Grade Centre is now accurate
- The course theme and menu’s colours can be changed to be more readable.
Blackboard Upgrade over the Easter Break
We would like to announce an upgrade of Blackboard for 2017. We have scheduled the upgrade to happen between 9 am Wednesday, 19 April until 9 am Friday, 21 April. This will mean that there will be no access to Blackboard during this timeframe.
This upgrade to Blackboard includes several behind the scenes improvements including:
- Submission receipts for students submitting an assignment.
- Drag and drop files for some areas, including students submitting assignments.
- New Icons for items in Blackboard.
- Many bug fixes including repairing reliability of the Last Access functionality.
You can keep up-to-date with news about this update by following the ITS Service Desk notices (http://www.otago.ac.nz/its/servicenotices/) and here on the eLearning blog (www.otago.ac.nz/elearning).
Embedding Videos with Unitube
Unitube and Otago Capture both have the ability to have their videos embedded inside other applications or websites. This means the video is still stored on Unitube or Capture but will play through the webpage or application you have embedded it into, and this will not affect the size quota you have on that application or website. It can be quite a powerful tool in your teaching or research.
One example we’ve seen of this in the past is using Unitube and the Qualtrics Survey tool. At the moment we do not have the ability to add videos to Qualtrics directly. But following these few steps you can embed them.
- Sign up for Qualtrics through ITS. It’s a fantastic survey tool that is free to use at Otago.
- Upload the video you wish to use to Unitube
- After the video has been processed copy the embed link
Embed Text on Unitube
- In your Qualtrics survey:
- Add a new question, make that question type Text/Description
- Change to HTML view
Change to HTML View
- In this view paste the embed link from Unitube.
- Lock the survey and distribute it.
- Check the video works on Qualtrics.
I’ve created this survey using Qualtrics and the University of Otago Theme so you can see how it works for participants. The survey can be found in this example survey.
If you want to know more about using any of these tools please get in touch.
