We would like to announce the upgrade of Blackboard for 2014. We have scheduled the upgrade to happen between 5pm Friday 5 December until 9am Monday 8 December. This will mean that there will be no access to Blackboard during this timeframe.
This upgrade to Blackboard includes several behind the scenes improvements as well as some new features. Some of the new features include:
- Student Preview Mode – This feature allows Instructors to see a true preview of their Blackboard paper as visible to students and provides significantly more features than changing the edit mode to Off. Student preview mode allows an Instructor to take tests and assignments with the grades recorded in the Grade Centre. Any data created during a Student Preview Session can be retained or deleted at its conclusion.
- Integration between the Assignments and Safe Assign Content Items – Once the upgrade is complete Instructors will be able to apply Safe Assign plagiarism checking to the Assignments instead of creating a separate Safe Assign item. This offers benefits of allowing multiple submissions and more fully-featured grading options which have not been available when using Safe Assign.
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). We will be using this blog to talk in more depth about the new features and improvements that have been made.
