Blogs and Podcast Update
On Wednesday 25 November at 9am the Blogs and Podcasts systems are going to be updated. This should take around 2 hours and will provide more some security and operational fixes to the system as well as:
- Customize Option in the Administration Menu – This allows you to change the theme, edit the menus and widgets without having to visit the Dashboard of the site.
- New Theme from Web Services – You can select this by choosing “University of Otago 2016”. If you don’t want to change you don’t have to, your current theme will still work on your site.
Blackboard Upgrade: Discussion Boards
With this year’s Blackboard upgrade rapidly approaching it is time to tell you about a few new features, today we’re going to look at Discussion Boards. The upgrade includes a complete redesign of the Thread Detail page whilst maintaining the existing functions. There are also a few new helpful features:
- All posts on one page – all the posts in one thread are displayed at the same time on one page.
- Post First Setting – when setting up a forum you can make it a requirement for students to post to a forum before they can see other students’ posts.
- Role Highlighting – posts made by forum managers and moderators now show the user’s paper role and forum role.
- Accessibility – reading a thread is now much easier with screen reader technology.
- Inline replies – when replying to a post, the text editor now appears on the same page as the post.
You can read more about the Discussion Board updates here: http://help.blackboard.com
Blackboard Upgrade 2013
We would like to announce the upgrade of Blackboard for 2013. We have scheduled the upgrade to happen between 5pm Friday 29 November until 9am Monday 2 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:
- New calendar – The update to the calendar provides some welcome features including a change to the interface. You can find out more about the new calendar on Blackboard’s official helpsite (help.blackboard.com)
- New Content Editor – This is a significant upgrade to the Content Editor in the new version of Blackboard which brings it inline with modern web standards. You can find out more about the new content editor on Blackboard’s official helpsite (help.blackboard.com)
As a consequence of the upgrade the Collaboration service (Virtual Classroom and Blackboard Chat) will no longer be offered. Users of the Collaboration services can achieve the same functionality by using Otago Connect.
You can keep up-to-date with news about this update by following the ITS Service Desk notices 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.
