“What’s New and Different” Demonstrations
IT Training will be running some “What’s New and Different” demonstrations in November and December , which will include the features you will see in Blackboard after the upgrade. The first dates/times are:
November 17 12:00
November 18 1:00
Location: Archway 3
University staff do not need to book or pay for these demonstrations.
The most significant change is to the Grade Book (now called the Grade Centre), and a couple of new features have been added, including an “Early Warning System” and a “Peer and self assessment” tool. If you are using the Gradebook we strongly advise going to a Grade Centre training course which will be offered in early 2009.
A sneak peak at Blackboard v8, Part 1: The Grade Centre
In December 2008, we will be upgrading Blackboard to v8 (we’re currently on v7.1). The new Grade Centre included in v8 is part of Blackboard’s “Next Generation” product, and is the first such feature to be rolled out before v9 (which is due out in 2009). For this reason, it looks and behaves quite unlike the rest of Blackboard; the interface is newer; and entering, viewing, and changing grades is much less click-intensive.
Blackboard's new grade centre
The many-layers-of-links which are common throughout Blackboard have been largely eliminated in the new Grade centre, and have been mostly replaced with contextual menus. Grades may be changed by clicking on a cell and entering a new value (much like Google documents). Sub-menus are revealed by hovering over a menu item, rather than clicking through multiple layers of navigation. Grade tasks are revealed by hovering over a grade.
In addition to the more interactive interface, there are a number of brand-new features within the Grade Centre itself:
- Smart Views: a filtering feature which let you save any number of preferred views (and make any of them the default). For example, you could create a “smart view” that only contains Surveys and ignores Tests; or one that only includes students in a particular Group (handy if you have a combination paper and want to manage marks separately).
- Column organisation: a drag & drop interface for ordering grade columns.
- Frozen columns: choose which columns remain on the screen at all times regardless of scrolling- handy when you have a large number of columns.
- Reports: generate reports on individual students or Groups, and include any/all of their grades, as well as median grades for each Test/Assignment.
- Grade History: view details about what grade was cleared or attempted, at what time, and by which user.
Creating a Smart View in the Grade Centre
IT Training will be doing some “What’s New” presentations in November 2008: keep an eye out on the IT Training site for details.
Blackboard Upgrade/Outage: December 2008
In early December, Blackboard will be upgraded from version 7.1 to version 8. This upgrade requires a week-long outage for software installation and testing to take place.
This means that Blackboard will be completely off-line from 5pm Friday, 28 November, to 9am Monday, 8 December. If you are teaching a paper during this time and this outage will adversely affect your
students, please contact the HelpDesk.
Email messages will be sent periodically to all departments as a reminder. As in previous years, we will be asking all staff teaching Summer School papers in 2009 to request rollovers in October/November.
Summer School 2009 Paper Co-ordinators: Please submit a rollover request NOW. We would like to have all Summer School papers rolled over in November.
Semester 2 and full Year 2008 Paper Co-ordinators: Please ensure you have exported your gradebook (if you need to keep grades) BEFORE the upgrade.
Note: Notices regarding outages, upgrades and other service incidents are on the ITS website. Some notices of interest to eLearning will also appear here, but please use the ITS page as your first port of call when looking for information about outages.
