Faculty Blackboard Support

Below are the Top 5 items the Blackboard Faculty Support Team has selected to highlight for your information: 

AI Design Assistant: Rubric Generation  

We optimized our AI Design Assistant rubric generation. Rubrics generated by the AI Design Assistant will now have more complex outputs. The AI Design Assistant will also work faster. Instructors can expect better rubrics, even for long, complicated assessments. 

Discussion Enhancement: New Post Indicator 

We added a “New” indicator that displays next to posts and replies that a user has not yet accessed. This helps direct engagement by making new discussion activity easier to find and access.  

Grade Override Improvements  

To increase transparency when overriding grades, we added an Override indicator to overridden grades on the Grades & Participation screen for Discussions.  

We implemented the Undo Override workflow on the Discussion grading interface, mimicking the Undo Override workflow in the Journal grading interface. 

Pronouns 

Blackboard has expanded its pronoun options to include neopronouns and gender fluid pronoun options. This update is an important step toward creating a more inclusive and welcoming environment for all users. Previously, pronoun options in Blackboard were limited, excluding many who use pronouns outside the traditional binary choices or a combination of pronouns. Please visit this knowledge article for additional details. 

Fall Semester Highlights 

Join us in an upcoming FreshForward episode as we look back through our top picks from the Fave Five In Five for the Fall 2024 semester.​ 

Blackboard Blog 

Blackboard Anthology is producing a corporate blog which will allow a quick grab/copy of screenshots for your change management initiatives. Please visit the link below: https://www.anthology.com/resources/blog.   

Below are the Top 5 items the Blackboard Faculty Support Team has selected to highlight for your information: 

Role Play Option For AI 

We expanded our AI Conversation feature to include a role play option. Role play can enhance learning by providing active learning opportunities. Role play also encourages critical thinking. It also provides an opportunity for students to apply knowledge in a simulated environment.  

For example, a student could role play a doctor by speaking to a patient, played by the AI persona. In this scenario, a student gains practical experience in a safe environment for experimentation.  

Instructors customize the AI persona by giving it a name and image. Instructors also define the AI persona’s personality traits and select the complexity of the responses.  

Instructors should always preview an AI conversation before releasing the activity to students. AI tools can hallucinate and introduce bias. It is important to ensure that instructions are clear and that the AI persona responds in an expected and appropriate way.  

We also introduced a stepped setup. This approach makes it easier for instructors to select the type of conversation and define the topic, student role, and AI persona. 

Print Tests With Questions From Question Pools And Other Improvements 

Instructors can now print tests that include questions from Question Pools. We also combined the answer key and the corresponding test. This ensures that users always have an answer key that matches the test. We generate the answer key and print it ahead of the test. We also labeled the Answer Key to ensure awareness.   

The system generates a different version of the answer key and test each time a test is printed when the test: 

• Randomizes questions or answer options   

• Includes Question Pools 

• Instructors can use the print option to save the answer key and test as a PDF.   

Skip Link to Course Information 

We added a second skip link to the Course Content page. In addition to the current skip link to tab directly into course items, users can now press the Tab key again to skip to course information. If users don’t use either skip link, they will tab into the course features. 

Video Studio Improvements 

We have enhanced Video Studio to improve the user experience for instructors. Instructors can now: 

• Edit video title 

• Select to record from connected devices 

• Retry a failed video upload 

• Edit video title 

• Instructors can edit the title of an audio/video recording or uploaded file after it is saved to the Document. 

While editing the document, the instructor can select the pencil icon from the top left of the video block. After the instructor selects the pencil icon, the previously uploaded video displays in the Upload Video screen. 

Device Selection 

With Video Studio, instructors can select the device used to record video and audio. By selecting the dropdown menu options for camera, mic, and screen, an instructor can choose from any connected devices on their computer. 

Retry A Failed Video Upload 

If an instructor uploads a file in Video Studio and the upload fails, they can select “Retry upload” at the top right corner of the screen or “Retry” next to the Upload process bar. 

Control Captions Display 

Video Studio makes recordings more accessible by automatically displaying captions. To accommodate diverse learner preferences, individual users turn captions on or off.  For example, a student can close the auto-generated captions if they do not want to view them. To turn off captions, select the captions button next to the progress bar at the bottom of the video. 

Control Transcript Display 

Video Studio also automatically generates a transcript for created or uploaded recordings. As with captions, students can control the display of the transcript. 

To view the transcript, select the transcript button next to the progress bar at the bottom of the video. 

Students can view the transcript in-line and in full screen in Documents when videos are displayed three and four columns wide. When videos are one to two columns wide, the transcript displays in full screen. 

Batch Edit: Usability Improvement 

“Change dates to a specific date and/or time” is the most popular option used in Batch Edit to change dates in a batch, so it is now the default option. This change simplifies the process for our users and helps instructors to prepare courses for teaching and learning even faster. 

Blackboard Blog 

Blackboard Anthology is producing a corporate blog which will allow a quick grab/copy of screenshots for your change management initiatives. Please visit the link below: https://www.anthology.com/resources/blog.   

Below are the Top 5 items the Blackboard Faculty Support Team has selected to highlight for your information: 

Generate Question Banks 

Creating questions is time consuming. Instructors now have the option to generate questions in a question bank. Generating question banks from course materials provides inspiration and saves time.  

To generate a question bank, select the Auto-generate option from the + on the Question Banks page. 

From the menu, instructors can select content items. These content items provide context for the questions. Instructors can further refine the questions they ask by entering a description of the learning objectives or topic.   

Instructors can select the type of question to generate, such as multiple choice or fill in the blank. The complexity of the questions can also be adjusted. Instructors choose which questions to include in the question bank.   

Award Course Badges with Achievements 

Achievements is a new capability for Ultra courses to help keep students motivated and congratulate them for their participation in a course. With Achievements: 

• Instructors can create course badges and set criteria for students to earn the badges.   

• Instructors can view which students earned a course badge. 

• Students can review the requirements to earn a course badge. 

• Students can view both earned and unearned course badges. 

• Leaders can use achievements in Ultra organizations. 

Achievements support learning in many ways: 

Supports self-directed learning pathways. Instructors can give learners tasks, goals, or quests with clearly defined criteria. Learners have more flexibility in how they approach their activities; they might choose to focus on a particular area of development before moving on to another. This flexibility can replace a set sequence to personalize learning. 

Engages and motivates learners. Some learners respond to extrinsic motivations. They feel accomplishment when they complete tasks.  Teaching methods can use achievements to add game mechanics to a course. 

Adds transparency to learning. Course badges that define the skills and competencies in a course can help students: 

• Follow how they’re developing competencies.  

• Understand and articulate to others what they’re learning. 

With this release, there are two achievement types: Course Badges and Open Badges.  

Create Course Badges 

Users with privileges to manage achievements can: 

• Create, publish, and delete course badges. 

• Select a badge image from a badge library. 

• Set performance criteria for one or more assessments in the course. With multiple performance criterion, students must meet all to earn the course badge. 

• Preview how the course badge appears to students. 

View Recipients Of Achievements 

On the Achievements tab, instructors can view the recipient count for each course badge. Select an achievement to review details about the recipients, including the date and time they earned the course badge. To review the settings for the badge, select Badge Settings. 

Review Achievements As A Student 

On the Achievements tab, students can review the details of badges and the requirements to earn them. They can also determine which badges they’ve earned, and which remain unearned. When a student earns a badge, the badge displays the date and time the badge was earned. 

Notes: 

• When overall grade or a calculated column is a performance criterion, that calculation itself is not enough to earn the achievement. Students must have scores for all gradable items used for the calculation. This requirement prevents a running total issuing a badge before a student completes all tasks. 

• When a gradable item has multiple attempts, it is calculated using one of the following: last attempt, first attempt, highest score, lowest score, or average of all attempts. If you need to change this setting, we recommend doing so before grading submissions. If you change it after grading, calculation updates may not award new achievements to students. If you encounter this issue, you can update student grades again for the item. 

• An earned achievement isn’t revoked if an instructor changes a student’s grades. 

• Custom badge images aren’t supported in this release. 

• Student preview isn’t supported in this release. 

• Once an achievement is published, it can’t be changed. If there is a configuration error, delete the achievement and create it again. 

• Achievements from Original course view do not convert when copying or importing a course. 

• Achievements can’t be copied from one Ultra course to another. We plan to support this in a future release. 

Considerations for early adoption: 

• The Achievements tab appears for all students, even when achievements aren’t used in the course. We plan to improve this in a future release. 

• Student preview isn’t supported in this release. 

• Course copy for achievements isn’t supported in this release. 

• Administrators can restrict who can manage achievements and view recipients of badges. Manage privileges for Achievements in Course Role and System Role configurations. 

• The Achievements management pages found in the Administrator panel main page and the Tools area are only for Original. These don’t apply to Achievements in Ultra. 

Enhancements To Student Submission Review Page 

The student submission review page makes it easier for students to access instructor feedback on their submissions. 

We made several enhancements to this page: 

• When an instructor selects student preview, they can now access the student submission review page. 

• Students can now access offline submissions from this page. 

• Students now have a Read more option for overall and attempt feedback. 

We also made general usability improvements, including additional labels and other indicators, to help students easily find the information they need. 

Email Notifications For Followed Discussions 

To encourage participation in discussions, we expanded notifications to include email. Emails are sent when users opt for Email me right away notifications.  

Key Enhancements:   

User Notification Settings: New notification options allow users to manage their emails for discussions they follow. To help with consistency, these settings align with the user’s settings for their activity stream.  

• Activity on my responses  

• Activity on responses I have replied to  

• Responses from instructors  

• Responses for followed discussions  

• Replies for followed discussions 

Instructors and students sometimes need to pay special attention to one or more discussions or threads in a course. Users can now easily follow specific discussions to receive email updates on new contributions. Institutions can set notification defaults for discussion activity and responses for followed discussions. This feature makes it easier for users to monitor and engage with class discussions from the Blackboard Mobile App. 

Quickly Access Items That Need Grade Reconciliation 

With parallel grading, multiple people can share grading responsibilities for a course. For example, an instructor can divide up the grading tasks among teaching assistants and other graders. The designated reconciler reviews all grades and feedback to determine the final grade.   

A Needs Reconciling section now appears on the gradebook Overview tab. In this section, reconcilers can easily access all items ready for reconciliation.   

Blackboard Blog 

Blackboard Anthology is producing a corporate blog which will allow a quick grab/copy of screenshots for your change management initiatives. Please visit the link below: https://www.anthology.com/resources/blog.   

Below are the Top 5 items the Blackboard Faculty Support Team has selected to highlight for your information: 

Content Designer: Knowledge Check in Documents  

The Content Designer for Documents now includes a Knowledge Check block. The Knowledge Check enhances the learning experience. Knowledge checks allow students to engage with content and receive immediate feedback. Instructors are also empowered with valuable insights to tailor their teaching strategies.  

Key Features: 

• Question Types: Multiple choice and multiple answer questions  

• Feedback: Pre-populated correct and incorrect answer feedback, which instructors can edit  

• Student Interaction: Students can select an answer and submit it. They receive immediate feedback on whether their answer is correct or incorrect. Knowledge checks allow unlimited attempts.  

• Metrics: Instructors can access detailed metrics including:  

• Number of students participating  

• Total number of attempts  

• Average number of attempts to reach the correct answer  

• Maximum number of attempts to reach the correct answer  

• Level of difficulty metric  

• Percentage of students selecting each answer option  

After saving the Knowledge Check, instructors may resize and move it as desired within the document.  

AI Conversation  

It’s tough to have 1:1 conversations with every student, especially in large courses. Some instructors are asking students to use AI services for topic-related activities to help. But, with many services and limited instructor visibility, results can vary.  

To better serve instructors who want to use AI with students, we’re launching a new activity called AI Conversation. This is a Socratic questioning exercise guided by AI. AI Conversation lets students explore their thoughts on a topic.  

There are two elements to the activity: 

• AI Conversation  

• This lets students think critically about the topic that the instructor designs. 

• Reflection question  

• This asks the student to share their thoughts on the activity. The reflection question also lets the student flag any bias or errors from the AI as part of our Trustworthy AI Approach. Reflection helps students understand the responsible use of AI services.  

Instructors have the following configuration options:  

• A topic for the AI Conversation  

• An AI persona including a name, avatar (can be uploaded or generated), and personality trait  

• Complexity level of responses  

• Edit the reflection question, guiding the student on how best to reflect on this activity  

On submission, the instructor can review the AI conversation transcript and the student’s reflection. The AI Conversation is a formative assessment by default, but you’re not restricted to this option. 

Exclude Attempt When Grading 

Allowing students to submit multiple attempts for an assessment can help them stay on track. It can improve the quality of the assessment and boost student success.   

However, there are some circumstances where an attempt doesn’t need to be graded. For example, the student may have submitted the wrong file, or their submission may be incomplete or an outlier.   

We added a new option to help instructors remove submissions from the grading workflow without having to delete them. When grading a student, you can now select Exclude Attempt to remove it from the Needs Grading workflow.   

If an attempt is excluded, the Excluded label appears above the attempt grade and in the attempt selector. If you need to remove the attempt exclusion, select from the menu.   

Grade calculations ignore excluded attempts. Students aren’t automatically granted an additional attempt if an attempt is excluded. You can grant additional attempts to the student via the exception’s workflow.   

You can exclude any submitted attempt by a student. If you exclude an attempt when the student has no remaining attempts, you receive a warning that their final grade can’t be calculated.   

When students review their submissions, a banner notification appears on excluded attempts. 

View Items That Need Grading And Posting In The New Overview  

To help instructors stay on top of their grading workload, we added an indicator to the Gradebook tab to let you know when there are new submissions to grade. The indicator displays the number that needs grading. If the count goes higher than 99, it displays as 99+.   

We also added a new gradebook Overview tab to improve task orientation and grading efficiency.  This tab contains two sections: Needs Grading and Needs Posting. 

Needs Grading section   

If you face a substantial grading workload, the Needs Grading section is a useful tool for prioritizing your tasks. It allows you to see all items ready for grading and a count of the total number of outstanding grading tasks in your course.   

This section displays up to five items at a time, ordered by the oldest ungraded submission. For an item, select Grade now to quickly access the submissions you need to grade. If your course has more than five items that need grading, you can use the buttons at the bottom of section to navigate through all pending tasks.   

Needs Posting section   

The Needs Posting section increases accessibility of assessments with grades that need posting. For an item, select Post now to its grade If there are more than five items that need posting, you can use the buttons at the bottom of section to navigate through the pending tasks.   

Student Activity Log  

Instructors often need to review student activity. Student activity helps inform decisions in academic disputes and aids in troubleshooting. You can also analyze the course participation of students at risk.  

Instructors can use student participation to support financial aid decisions. For example, requests for tuition fee reimbursements if a student hasn’t participated in a course. Course participation records can also help with awarding scholarships.  

Now the Student Overview page has a student activity log. Instructors and other higher roles can use the report to check what a particular student did in a course. 

Blackboard Blog 

Blackboard Anthology is producing a corporate blog which will allow a quick grab/copy of screenshots for your change management initiatives. Please visit the link below: https://www.anthology.com/resources/blog.   

Below are the Top 5 items the Blackboard Faculty Support Team has selected to highlight for your information: 

Multiple Rules For Release Conditions 

Instructors need to release course content based on performance criteria to sequence students on learning paths correctly. Sometimes they also need to release content to different groups using different criteria. For example, graduate students may be required to perform additional activities or perform at a higher level than other students. To support this needed flexibility, instructors can now create multiple rules for release conditions.  

You can create rules for release conditions based on these criteria: date, time, and grade range performance criteria. You can also create rules for specific individual learners, groups, or for all members. 

This release also improves copying content from Original courses. Rules and criteria now copy from Original adaptive release settings. The supported criterion types are date, time, grade range, and memberships (individual or groups). Only supported criteria types are copied from Original to Ultra courses. These criteria types are removed automatically during a copy: 

• Attempt for a gradable item (student submitted the assignment or test) 

• Student marked an item reviewed 

Improvements To Creating Assignments 

Instructors need robust, easy to use tools when creating their assessments.  

To create a better experience, the new Assignment page includes these improvements:  

• A new Instructions box where instructors can use the full content editor to craft assignment instructions. 

• There are no options to add questions to an assignment.  

• The Settings panel now includes only options relevant to assignments.  

• Blank attempts are no longer created when students view assignment instructions. The system only creates an attempt when students add content to the file drop zone / content editor. Note: Group or timed and proctored assignments continue to create attempts when students view the instructions. 

The New Test page remains unchanged. Instructors can access all the same question types and settings options. Attempts are still automatically created when students view the test questions.   

Content Designer: Enhanced Documents 

Content design is key to creating an engaging course that supports learner needs. The Document feature is a useful option for creating and presenting a variety of visual elements. We have made significant enhancements to Documents to provide new and robust options for content design. Instructors will be delighted that all enhancements work beautifully using a mouse, trackpad, or the keyboard. All enhancements are mobile friendly for instructors and students.   

Instructors can now design Documents by selecting from a variety of block types.  

• Content block – Add content via the content editor.  

• HTML block – Add content via HTML or CSS in the Document.  

• File upload block – Browse for files on the local machine to upload to the Document. Note: Administrators can define the maximum size of a file that users can upload.  

• Cloud upload block – Login to a cloud service and select a file to add into the Document.  

• Content Collection block – Browse the Content Collection and select a file to add to the Document.  

• Convert a file block – Browse for files on the local machine. Once selected, the system converts the file into the Document format. Supported file types include PDF, PowerPoint (ppt, pptx, pps), and Word (doc, docx, odt). 

Instructors can also open the left panel by selecting the + and choosing the desired block.   

Document Menu Bar 

To provide greater efficiency when designing content, we added a menu bar to Documents. The menu bar remains in view as the instructor scrolls the Document to view, add, or edit content. The menu bar contains the Edit option when in the view state. After selecting Edit, the menu bar displays the following options:  

• Edit  

• Add Blocks  

• Undo/Redo 

• Cancel  

• Save 

Resizing And Moving Blocks  

Instructors can create appealing layouts by resizing and dragging/dropping blocks into columns and rows.  

• Each row includes a menu with options to move or delete the block.  

• Each block includes a menu with options to edit, move or resize, or delete the block. 

Video Studio: Enhanced Documents 

Instructors have recording capabilities in Announcements and Feedback features. Now, they have the ability to upload or record audio and videos within enhanced Documents. The lightweight, deeply integrated Video Studio solution promotes a more engaging learning experience. 

When creating an enhanced Document, a new block option is available to create audio and video files from a camera, audio recording, or from screen recordings. Additionally, it is possible to upload audio and video files. 

When a user starts recording, there is a 3 second countdown before the recording begins. Users can pause, resume, retake, or end the recording as needed. 

After a user ends the recording, the uploading process begins. During this time, the user can preview the result, edit the title, and add a description. Users can select Save to add the audio or video into an enhanced Document. After saving the video, auto captioning for videos is available. 

Hide Unenrolled Students From The Gradebook 

Students can change their course schedules at the beginning of a term or semester. Institution policy determines what happens when students change classes. At some institutions, when a student drops a class their enrollment (membership) record is set to unavailable. They display in the gradebook with a strikethrough on their avatar. The instructor’s gradebook can become cluttered with students who aren’t actively enrolled in the class. 

Using the new Students Visibility setting, instructors now have the option to hide or show unenrolled students.  

You can access the Students Visibility setting from two locations:  

• Course settings 

• Gradebook settings  

If you change the Students Visibility from Course settings, it will also change in Gradebook settings, and vice versa. Also, the selected visibility setting applies to all users teaching the course.  

The Students Visibility setting affects these gradebook areas:  

• Grades page  

• Students page  

• Calculation student list  

• Gradable items student list  

• Submission tab for an assessment  

• Student Activity tab for an assessment 

Blackboard Blog 

Blackboard Anthology is producing a corporate blog which will allow a quick grab/copy of screenshots for your change management initiatives. Please visit the link below: https://www.anthology.com/resources/blog.   

Below are the Top 5 items the Blackboard Faculty Support Team has selected to highlight for your information: 

Print Answer Key For Assessments 

Instructors can now print an answer key for their assessments. A printed answer key is helpful for grading any printed assessment.  Printing provides a convenient solution for a variety of use cases: 

• Accommodating students with specific needs or limited technology access 
• Providing a printed assessment for testing in designated centers 
• Backup and record keeping 
• Conducting offline assessment 
• Documentation and compliance 

• Maintaining security and integrity 

The print answer key option is available in Tests and Assignments with questions. Instructors may also save answer keys as a PDF. 

Send A Copy To Email When Scheduling Announcements 

Managing communication with students is an important instructor task. Instructors often plan certain communications in advance. Now instructors can schedule an announcement for a future date and select that it will send an email copy. The announcement tool will send the email copy on the day and time the announcements are posted.  

In the past, instructors could schedule an announcement that would present to students on the selected day and time. Instructors could also immediately post an announcement and send an email copy to students at the same time. 

Recording Audio And Video When Adding Per Question Feedback 

When grading by student or question, instructors can now provide contextual feedback as recorded audio and video. Instructors can add recorded feedback to all question types. Question level feedback promotes deeper understanding and personal growth among students. Question level feedback enhances overall submission feedback and automated feedback for auto-graded questions. 

Needs Grading Improvements For Assessments Allowing Multiple Attempts 

The value of multiple attempts on an assessment ranges from support of mastery learning to reducing student anxiety. To help instructors grade assessments with multiple attempts, we have added new settings. 

When an instructor chooses to allow multiple attempts, there is now a way to see which attempt(s) display as Needs Grading. 

From the ‘Attempts to grade’ menu. The options are: 

• First attempt 
• Last attempt (default) 
• All attempts 

If All Attempts is selected, the instructor must also select the calculation method for the student’s grade. 

From the Final Grade Calculation menu, the options are: 

• Average  
• Highest (default) 
• Lowest 

Needs Grading Improvements For Students and Questions Tabs 

Anthology continues to improve the grading experience for instructors. Now, the Needs Grading filter for the Student and Questions tabs reflect the ‘Attempts to grade’ assessment setting. 

The Needs Grading filter on the Student tab will now only display students with ungraded attempts that count towards Needs Grading.   

The Needs Grading filter on the Questions tab will now only display questions with ungraded responses from attempts that count towards Needs Grading.   

Blackboard Blog 

Blackboard Anthology is producing a corporate blog which will allow a quick grab/copy of screenshots for your change management initiatives. Please visit the link below: https://www.anthology.com/resources/blog.   

Below are the Top 9 items the Blackboard Faculty Support Team has selected to highlight for your information: 

Printing For Assessments 

Instructors can now print assessments. Printing provides a convenient solution for a variety of use cases: 

• Accommodating students with specific needs or limited technology access 
• Providing a printed assessment for testing in designated centers 
• Backup and record keeping 
• Conducting offline assessment 

• Documentation and compliance 
• Maintaining security and integrity 

The print option is available in Forms, Tests, and Assignments with questions. Printing also provides the option to save as PDF. 

To print an assessment, from Content and Settings, select Print. 

Please note: At this time printing answer keys and question pools and printing from the mobile app is not available and will be coming in an upcoming release. 

Grader Notes On Student Grades  

Instructors can now add private grading notes to student grades. After a score is assigned, the new Feedback & Notes menu option is available. Grader notes form an important part of the academic record. These notes may serve as documentation for a grading decision or grade adjustment.  Grader notes are private to graders and not visible to students. 

Those with grading privileges can access Feedback & Notes from two places:  

• The Grades tab in the Gradebook by selecting a specific score. 
• The Submissions list page for an assessment, select the More menu for a student 

Improved Visibility Of New Grades And Feedback In The Student Gradebook 

To ensure that students are aware of any new grades in the course we have added an indicator to the Gradebook tab. When there are new grades, the number of new grades appears on the tab. 

After selecting the tab, items with new or updated grades appear at the top of the student gradebook and display a purple indicator. The purple indicator disappears and the count on the tab reduces when the student selects the item or reviews their submission.   

We also reviewed the use of color in the gradebook based on student feedback. Now, we mark late assessments with a “(Late)” label to reduce stress sometimes associated with the use of the color red. In the past, late submissions appeared with a red assessment icon and label. 

Filter Out Graded Responses When Grading By Question 

The Needs Grading filter now filters out graded student responses by default. Filtering this way helps instructors to focus on any remaining ungraded responses for a given question. It also provides instructors with an improved view of their outstanding grading workload. If instructors want to include graded responses, they can select Show graded responses. This selection preference is now stored per course and it persists across assessments in each course. 

Post Immediately When Creating Announcements  

Instructors can now post announcements as part of the drafting and editing processes. This makes the process of creating and posting announcements simpler.  

AI Design Assistant – Language Selector 

To support multi-language use cases, the AI Design Assistant now includes a language selector. Instructors may use the language selector to set the desired language for generated content. This feature is especially beneficial for courses with multi-language requirements.  

Weighted Calculation Usability Improvements 

Responding to client feedback, we have made two improvements for gradebook weighting: 

• The label “0% per item” appeared for categories excluded from weighting. This caused confusion so we removed it. 
• We updated the calculation rules panel to make it easier to understand the selected settings. 

Group Members List Available Within The Selected Group 

Groups and group work form an important part of the learning experience. To improve and centralize member information, we have relocated the members list to the selected group page. This will now display as a member’s tab rather than a separate panel. Here, users can search for members and sort them alphabetically. This change enhances the visibility of the selected groups page and provides the groundwork for adding more features in future releases.  

Prevent Auto-assigning Members In Self-Enrollment Groups  

Instructors use self-enrollment groups to provide agency to students on group activities. Currently, at the end of the enrollment period, unassigned students are always distributed into groups. To improve the use of self-enrollment groups for optional activities, instructors can now opt-out of this behavior. Instructors can deselect the option, which does not enroll students who do not self-enroll by the end of the enrollment to any group. This option gives instructors more flexibility when managing self-enrollment groups.  

Blackboard Blog 

Blackboard Anthology is producing a corporate blog which will allow a quick grab/copy of screenshots for your change management initiatives. Please visit the link below: https://www.anthology.com/resources/blog.   

Below are the Top 8 items the Blackboard Faculty Support Team has selected to highlight for your information: 

AI Design Assistant – Context picker for Learning Modules, Assignments, Discussions, and Journals  

Context selection is key for tailoring course content generated with the AI Design Assistant. The context picker also helps to ground generated content in an appropriate context. 

We are extending the context picker for test questions to other generation workflows:  

• Learning modules  
• Authentic assignments  
• Authentic discussions  
• Authentic journals 

Assessments, Forms, and Question Banks – Duplicate Questions 

This enhancement is a direct response to client feedback. 

Sometimes an instructor may want to have a question repeated with the same answer options but a different question. The “Duplicate” option allows instructors to quickly copy an existing question within the same assessment (test, assignment, form) or in a question bank. This feature eliminates the need for manual duplication. It simplifies the process of creating multiple questions with the same answer options. 

Tests & Assignments – Auto-submitted Indicator In Attempt Logs  

Understanding the context of student submissions is helpful to instructors. Now the Attempt Log indicates whether a submission is manual or automatic. This indicator provides instructors with deeper insights into student behaviors. This addition also allows instructors to better track their student progress.  

Tests & Assignments - Default question points value changed from 10 to 1  

We recognize that manually adjusting the point value for questions can be time-consuming and error prone. Based on valuable client feedback, we are changing the default point value from 10 to 1. Moving forward, any newly created questions will have a default point value of 1. This change helps reduce the need for manual adjustments.   

Tests & Assignments – Student Feedback Remains Visible To Students Regardless Of Release Condition Settings  

Instructors may want to control access to course content using release conditions. This is helpful for providing custom learning paths through course content. The release conditions include an option to show or hide content to/from students before they meet release conditions. We’ve modified how these settings impact the students’ view of feedback from instructors. Now instructors can set release conditions without any impact to feedback to students.   

In the past, when an instructor selected the option to hide content, students could view associated grades but not the feedback. We have corrected this to ensure that students can always review feedback.   

Flexible Grading – Usability Improvements 

Streamlining the grading process saves instructors time and reduces their workload. We have implemented several enhancements to Flexible Grading in response to instructor feedback. All the enhancements target improved usability and efficiency.   

We relocated the attempt selector to improve visibility and efficiency. It is now nearer to the attempt grade pill. This allows instructors to switch between a student’s attempts during grading.   

The grading interface now displays a single grade pill. This provides a more intuitive grading workflow. The single grade pill also prevents accidental grade overrides.  

Overriding the final grade is now an explicit grading option. The three-dot menu next to the attempt grade pill now includes an Override Final Grade option. When selected, an Override label appears above the grade pill. Here the instructor can adjust the final grade for the submission.  

The submission receipt for the selected attempt now displays beneath the attempt selector. 

Flexible Grading – Add Question Feedback When Grading By Student 

Instructors can now provide contextual feedback by student on all question types. Question level feedback promotes deeper understanding and personal growth among students. Question level feedback complements the existing capabilities of overall submission feedback and automated feedback for auto-graded questions. 

Once students have submitted their tests and scores are posted, students can access the feedback. Students can access both overall feedback and question-specific feedback. 

Batch Edit – Individual Date Adjustments  

Updating availability and due dates after a course copy, import, or a conversion can take time. We’re making it easier for instructors to make date adjustments for any item on the Batch Edit page. Instructors now have the option to change the due date and availability (Show On and Hide After) for any item.  

Blackboard Blog 

Blackboard Anthology is producing a corporate blog which will allow a quick grab/copy of screenshots for your change management initiatives. Please visit the link below: https://www.anthology.com/resources/blog.   

The December 2023 – V3900.80 release is robust with features in eight areas: 

• Instructional design 
• Tests and assignments 
• Flexible grading 
• Gradebook 
• Integrations 
• Learn core and security,  
• Mobile app; and 
• Upgrade to Ultra

Below are the Top Seven items the Blackboard Team has selected to highlight for your information: Read the full V3900.80 release notes.

Authentic Discussion and Journal Prompts

AI plagiarism is a growing concern among academics. Research indicates a variety of issues with a reliance on AI detection. Detection models cannot keep up with advancements in AI technologies. Our approach to combatting AI plagiarism is different. We empower instructors and lean on the effective practice of authentic assessment. 

Learn more by reading our white paper about AI, Academic Integrity, and Authentic Assessment. 

Now, instructors can generate discussion and journal prompts that encourage students to: 

• engage in higher-order thinking, 
• apply their knowledge, 
• justify or challenge their beliefs and ideas, 

• and emulate real-world situations. 

To ensure the instructor is in control, the generation process allows instructors to: 

• enter a discussion or journal description, 
• select a desired cognitive process based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, 
• set the complexity, 
• and generate a discussion or journal title. 

The instructor can review the generated prompts and select one to add to the discussion or journal. After adding the prompt, the instructor can edit or further refine the prompt as appropriate. 

Large Rubric Support

Rubrics serve as a well-organized and transparent framework for assessing student work. We now support an unlimited number of rubric criteria and performance levels, up from 15 each. This change empowers instructors to craft rubrics that support diverse assessment scenarios. Unbound rubrics are valuable where a higher number of criteria are needed. Larger rubrics also prove invaluable for rubrics employed in accreditation processes. 

Group Assessment Due Date Exceptions

Instructors may want to set different due dates for each group working on a group assessment. 

In the past, there was no way to assign varying due dates for each group working on a group assessment. Now, instructors can assign a unique due date to each group using the exceptions workflow. 

On the group assessment Submissions page, the instructor may add or edit exceptions for a group. 

The Exceptions panel displays relevant information such as the assignment name and selected group name. This helps ensure the accuracy of an exception. Instructors can select a due date for the group using the date and time picker. 

Flexible Grading – Sorting Controls on Students Tab 

Grading large numbers of submissions without a way to organize them can be tedious. Now, instructors can apply various sorting options in flexible grading: 

• Submission date (oldest – newest) of latest attempt 
• Submission date (newest – oldest) of latest attempt 
• Last Name (A – Z) 
• Last Name (Z – A) 
• First Name (A – Z) 
• First Name (Z-A) 
• Student ID (ascending) 
• Student ID (descending) 

The grading interface stores the most recently used sorting option. If an instructor stops grading an assessment and resumes grading later, the last sorting option is applied. 

Also, if sorting the submissions by last name or grading status, the chosen sorting option carries over into the grading interface. 

Additional Image Insertion and Generate Options

Images enhance comprehension of and engagement with course content. Instructors and students want to use high-quality images in content and submissions. To help, we have added a new image button in the content editor in the following places: 

• Announcements
• Assessment Questions 
• Student answers on questions (local file upload only)
• Submission feedback (standard view)
• Journal entries and comments

Mobile App – Enhancements to Grades

In response to user feedback, we’ve made improvements to the Grades page. The Grades page now offers more comprehensive information for students and instructors. We enhanced both the appearance and functionality. 

For Instructors: 

• Upcoming Grading 

• Upon expansion, instructors find items that need grading

• Concise View 

• We’ve limited the display to only three items at a time 
• A Show More link is available, leading to the gradebook for that course 

• Efficient Navigation 

• Instructors can access grading tasks by selecting the respective item

• In the past, grade pills were black. Now grade pills display corresponding grade colors

For Students: 

• Upcoming Due Items 

• When expanding the section, students now find items that are due within a week 

• Recently Graded 

• Expanded sections display items that have been recently graded

• Concise View 

• To avoid clutter, we’ve limited the display to only three items at a time
• A Show more link is available, leading to the gradebook for that course

• Quick Access 

• By selecting any item, users can navigate to the specific assessment or activity

• In the past, grade pills were black. Now grade pills display corresponding grade colors

Blackboard blog

Blackboard Anthology is producing a corporate blog which will allow a quick grab/copy of screenshots for your change management initiatives. Please visit Anthology.com.

The November 2023 – V3900.78 release is robust with features in eight areas:

• Instructional design 
• Tests and assignments 
• Communication and collaboration 
• Flexible grading 
• Gradebook 
• Integrations 
• Learn core and security, and  
• Upgrade to Ultra. 

Below are the top five items the Blackboard team has selected to highlight for your information. Read the full V3900.78 release notes.

AI Images: Ultra Document, Journals, Discussions, Assessment Attempts, and Course Messages 

Images play an important role in a student’s education experience. Images help to enhance comprehension of and engagement with course content. To help instructors more easily identify high-quality images, we have added a new image button in the content editor in the following places: 

• Ultra Documents 

• Journal prompts 
• Discussions 
• Course Messages 

 When selected, the instructor has the following options: 

• Upload an image through selection or drag and drop 
• Select a royalty-free, high-quality image from Unsplash 

Students can also access the new image button on the content editor in the following areas: 

• Discussion responses 
• Assessments and test question inputs 

• Course Messages 

After selecting the image, instructors and students can reposition the focus and zoom of the image. There’s also an option to alter the aspect ratio of the image. 

Users can rename the image. It is important always to consider the accessibility of course content. The user should mark the image as decorative or provide suitable alternative text. 

Instructors can also set the view and download file options for the image. After the image is inserted, the user can resize the image.

Gradebook: Sorting Controls for Student Name, Overall Grade, Assessments, and Manual Columns in Grid View

Sorting options in the gradebook provide a more efficient grading experience. 

Now instructors can sort the following gradebook grid view columns: 

Student Name 

Overall Grade 

Tests and Assignments 

Manual columns 

Instructors can sort records in ascending or descending and remove any applied sorting. A purple highlight in the column header helps instructors identify where sorting is applied.

Any sorting applied yields a temporary change to the sort order of all columns in the gradebook grid view.

Tests & Assignments 

Matching Question Updates Partial Credit Auto-Distribution and Other Updates

Matching questions are useful for testing a student’s skill in making accurate connections between related concepts. This question type also checks students’ understanding in a structured format.

To reward students who show partial understanding, some instructors wish to award partial and/or negative credit for matching questions.

In the past, instructors selected a scoring option: 

• allow partial credit, 
• all or nothing, 
• subtract points for incorrect matches, but question score can’t be negative 
• or allow negative question scores. 

These options were exclusive and, at times, created confusion for instructors. We removed these options.

Now, partial and negative credit is turned on by default. We auto-distribute partial credit as a percentage across the matching pairs. The auto-distribution of credit saves instructors time. Instructors can edit the partial credit values if needed to grant some pairs more or less credit. Values for partial credit must sum to 100%.

If desired, instructors may also specify a negative credit percentage to any pair. Negative credit is only assessed when applied and when a student mismatches a pair. If desired, instructors may choose to allow an overall negative score for the question.

We also made a few other improvements to this question: 

We re-worded the question construction guidance and moved it to an info bubble. 
In the past, the “reuse an answer” and “delete pair” options were behind the three-dot menu. Now, these options appear on the right side of the answer for each pair. 

Before reused answers appeared as “Reused answer from pair #” in the answer field. Now, the answer itself is displayed in the answer field. “Reused answer” appears beneath the answer for the pair. 

We renamed “Additional answers” to “Distractors.”

Late Submission Indicator in Submission Receipts

Students lead busy lives and sometimes submit assessments late. Some instructors and institutions use penalties or deduct points for late submissions. Based on direct feedback from instructors, we added a new ‘late indicator’ to the submission receipt. This indicator is present only if a student submits the assessment late. 

Students can view the late submission indicator in: 

• the confirmation modal displayed upon a successful submission, 
• the downloaded version of the submission receipt, and 
• the emailed submission confirmation. 

Flexible Grading 

Anonymous Grading in Flexible Grading view 

Instructors can reduce grading bias for high-stakes assessments by enabling anonymous grading. Many consider it an important grading approach.

Anonymous grading is now available in the new Flexible Grading experience. Instructors can now complete the following tasks and actions:  

• Grade test and assignment submissions by student 

• Filter on grading status of choice 
• Navigate between students and multiple submission attempts 
• Keep track of grading progress 
• View both the attempt – and the final grade for each assessment 
• Provide meaningful feedback, with or without a rubric 

• Grade inline using Blackboard Annotate 
• Collapse side panels to view more of the student submission 
• Show an originality score if SafeAssign is used 

We plan to support anonymous grading for tests by question in a future release. 
 
Grading optimization for file-based Assignment submissions in Flexible Grading  
 
Some instructors design assignments that require students to attach one or more files.

In the past, if a student attached multiple files to their assignment submission, the Bb Annotate inline grader displayed for each submitted file. This behavior introduced usability issues: 

It was difficult for the instructor to know how many files the student had submitted easily. 
Multiple stacked Bb Annotate instances, one for each attachment. This caused multiple scroll bars on the grading page, making navigation difficult. 

Now, when grading file-based submissions, a tabbed interface appears. The first tab displays the assessment instructions. After that, there is one tab for each submitted file. The first attached file displays by default. 

This new tab-based navigation has several benefits:  

• More of the student submission is visible to the grader without scrolling 

• Navigating file-based submissions is more transparent and easy by removing multiple scroll bars 
• The option to download the student-submitted file(s) is more apparent 
• The number of files the student attached to their submission is clear 
• Graders can switch between the assessment instructions and the submitted file(s) 
• Graders can easily navigate across the submitted files 

Edit/Regrade in Questions view  
 
Instructors may spot a mistake in a test question when grading a test submission. For example, instructors may have found a typo, chosen a wrong answer, or want to adjust points. 

In the past, the “Edit/Regrade Questions” option was only available when grading submissions by “Student.”  Now, instructors can also access the Edit/Regrade workflow when grading by question. 

Tab Navigation For Journals

To improve navigation for journals, we have introduced a new tab navigation. Now, instructors can switch between the Journal and the Participation page. When an instructor sets up a journal for grading, the Participation is replaced by Grades & Participation. This update improves the usability of the journal. It also provides consistency of navigation with discussions and assessments.

Blackboard blog

Blackboard Anthology is producing a corporate blog which will allow a quick grab/copy of screenshots for your change management initiatives. Please visit Anthology.com.

The October 2023 – V3900.76 release is robust with features in eight areas:

• Assignments and tests;
• Communication and collaboration;
• Gradebook;
• Learner progression and personalized experience;
• Integrations;
• Learn core and security;
• Mobile; and
• Upgrade to Ultra

Below are the top five items the Blackboard team has selected to highlight for your information. Read the full V3900.76 release notes.

Sorting controls for manually added gradable items

Sorting controls help instructors organize and find the information in the gradebook. Instructors can now use sorting controls on the grades page for manually created items.

The sorting controls enable sorting in both ascending and descending order. Instructors can sort the following information:

• Student name 
• Grade 
• Feedback 
• Post status 

The applied sorting order is temporary and resets when you leave the page.

Sorting controls can be applied to one column at a time. When you sort another column, items will order according to the selected column.

Send a reminder from Gradebook list and grid views

Part of effective teaching is student support. Instructors may want to send a reminder to students or groups who haven’t yet made a submission for an assessment. To make this easy, we have added a Send Reminder option to items in the Gradebook.

Reminders is an option for all gradebook items, including LTI and third-party tools.

From the Gradebook list view, this option is in the overflow menu.

Instructors may access the Send Reminder option in the grid view by selecting the gradebook column header.

Reminders are sent as a blind carbon copy to non-submitting students or groups as a course message.

Instructors can view the sent message in their course messages. If messages are off and the reminder is sent as an email, the instructor will receive a copy of the email.

When sending the reminder, the instructor will need to confirm their intent to send the reminder. The confirmation displays a count of the number of non-submitting students or groups who will receive the reminder.

For anonymous grading, non-submitting students receive the reminder via e-mail. This ensures that anonymity is preserved.

Copying Grading Schemas from course to course

Instructors can now copy their custom grading schemas from Ultra and Original courses to other Ultra courses. These schemas are listed in a Grading Schemas folder on the Copy Items panel.

A course may contain up to 100 grading schemas. If the number of selected schemas plus that already in the course exceeds this limit, the system will copy as many schemas as possible up to a total of 100. An informative banner alerts the instructor of this situation so they can take appropriate action.

Partial credit auto-distribution for correct answers for multiple choice questions

Multiple choice questions with more than one correct answer are valuable assessment tools. Also known as multiple-answer or multiple-select questions, these questions assess comprehensive understanding. They also promote deeper learning and higher-order thinking skills.

Some instructors wish to award partial credit for these question types. This practice awards students who have a partial understanding. It also fosters a positive learning experience.

In the past, instructors had to enter a value for partial credit percentage for each option. Now, we auto-distribute partial credit across correct answer choices. This distribution provides efficiency and saves instructors’ time. If desired, instructors can edit the values if some correct answer options warrant more or less credit. Values for correct answers must sum to 100 per cent.

Deselect answer choice for multiple choice question 

In the past, a student could select an answer choice for a multiple choice question, change their mind, and mark another answer choice. However, the student wasn’t able to deselect an answer choice to return the question to an unanswered state. Now, students can deselect an answer choice. Deselecting a choice is helpful when a student doesn’t want to guess. Deselecting a choice also allows the student to skip the question and return to it using the unanswered questions filter.

Blackboard blog

Blackboard Anthology is producing a corporate blog which will allow a quick grab/copy of screenshots for your change management initiatives. Please visit Anthology.com.

The September 2023 – V3900.74 release is robust with features in eight areas:

• AI Design Assistant;
• Instructional design;
• Flexible grading;

• Gradebook;
• Learner progression and personalized experience;
• Integration;
• Learn core and security; and
• Mobile App

Below are the top five items the Blackboard team has selected to highlight for your information. Read the full V3900.74 release notes.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) Design Assistant

The potential uses of Artificial Intelligence are exciting. As we look to explore the benefits AI has to offer, we are prioritizing lawful, ethical, and responsible use. We have established our Trustworthy AI principles, where we commit to: 

• humans in control,
• fairness,

• privacy,
• security and
• safety, to name a few.

We recommend reviewing the documents linked below as you consider using AI within Learn Ultra. These documents are designed to support your implementation, training, and policy setting as it relates to AI usage.

Our Trustworthy AI Principles can be found in our Trust Center.

• Further information on the AI Design Assistant can be found on our help pages.
• Link on the item above still to be created; legal is working on the content.

We chose to partner with Microsoft to provide this functionality for many reasons. A primary reason is that Microsoft has a long-standing commitment to the ethical use of AI. Please find helpful resources from Microsoft below:

• Microsoft’s Responsible AI page
• Microsoft’s Transparency Note for Azure Open AI Service

• Microsoft’s page on Data, privacy, and security for Azure Open AI Service

Creating a course from the ground up can often feel like a daunting and time-intensive task. Some educators might find themselves without access to the necessary instructional design resources, leaving them in search of extra support.

Enter the AI Design Assistant—an innovative solution designed to tackle these very challenges. By harnessing the power of advanced AI, this assistant offers a helping hand in structuring your course. Drawing insights from the course’s title, description, and contextual information, it effortlessly generates learning modules.

What sets the AI Design Assistant apart is its commitment to putting instructors in the driver’s seat. Empowering educators, it allows for the provision of supplementary context, such as descriptive text or keywords. Instructors have the flexibility to add a title prefix—think “topic” or “unit”—infusing a personalized touch. Visual elements can also be seamlessly integrated, amplifying the learning experience.

In a testament to customization, instructors wield the ability to fine-tune the complexity of their content. Additionally, they can precisely dictate the quantity of learning modules to be generated, ensuring a tailored approach to their teaching journey.

All learning module images are automatically marked as decorative by default. The instructor has the ability to edit each learning module and add a specific alternative description if this image context is required.

Learning Module Image Integration Options

Learning modules serve as a strategic tool for structuring and curating course content. Elevating both the visual allure of the learning modules and the ease of content discernment is important. To help, we plan to provide two more options for integrating images into learning modules.

Search stock images from Unsplash. With this option, instructors can enter keywords to search for and select high-quality, royalty-free images. When enabled, the AI Design Assistant suggests keywords.

Generate images with the AI Design Assistant. Image generation leverages insights from the learning module description and other contextual cues in the course. To further empower instructors, they can describe the ideal image and regenerate images.

Note that images will automatically appear if your administrator activates “Generate keywords for Unsplash.”

Once the ideal image is selected, the instructor can choose the focal point of the image.

The image is marked as decorative by default. The instructor can untick ‘Mark the image as decorative’ and add specific alternative text.

Rubric Generation

Grading rubrics offer a structured framework to assess student work. They ensure both fairness and consistency in grading. Moreover, they furnish students with clear directives to meet desired learning outcomes. However, crafting rubrics can be a time-intensive task. The AI Design Assistant can take the helm in rubric creation, drawing cues from course context. While retaining human-centered authority, instructors can define the rubric. This includes specifying details like descriptions (learning objectives or topics), rubric type (percentage, points, or range), complexity, and dimensions. The rubric remains open to review and refine, guaranteeing the instructor’s input at every step.

Rubric generation is an option everywhere we support rubric creation.

Test Question Generation

Crafting test questions from the ground up demands a significant amount of time. The AI Design Assistant steps in to offer test question suggestions, helping instructors reclaim valuable time. This resource is beneficial for both formative and summative assessments.

Instructors can refine the suggested questions by adding a description. The description might be learning objectives or topics. Furthermore, instructors can handpick preferred question types. The innovative “Inspire me!” question type suggests a variety of question types that an instructor might not typically consider. The instructor can specify the desired level of complexity and number of questions.

Question Bank Generation from Ultra Documents

The Ultra Document is a valuable way to present content. It seamlessly blends text and media components, enriching content presentation. With the aid of the AI Design Assistant, instructors can build question banks to gauge comprehension of the text-based elements within an Ultra Document. This streamlined process saves significant time. It also stands as a robust aid in shaping both formative and summative assessments. 

Instructors can select preferred question types or use the “Inspire me!” option. The instructor can specify the desired level of complexity and number of questions. After reviewing the questions, it’s a single click to publish the questions to the question bank. 

From the question bank, the instructor can filter, search, and edit questions as desired.

Course Banner Images from Unsplash

The course banner image provides an important sense of identity for the course. We are expanding the image options for the course banner by introducing Stock Images from Unsplash. Instructors can enter keywords to search for high-quality, royalty-free images.

Images will automatically appear if your administrator has activated Generate keywords for Unsplash. Once the ideal image is selected, the instructor can choose the focal point of the image.

The image is marked as decorative by default. The course banner toggle is turned on. The instructor can untick ‘Mark the image as decorative’ and add specific alternative text.

Learning Modules provide a way to organize and structure content. To enhance the visual aesthetics of a course and to aid in content identification, we now support the option to add images to Learning Modules.

• to add an image to a Learning Module, instructors can edit the module,
• instructors can drag and drop an image of their choice or upload one from their device,
• the image appears in preview. This helps the instructor ensure that the desired image is selected,
• instructors can drag the image and modify the zoom to select the focal point of the image,

• instructors can mark the image as decorative or provide appropriate alternative text.

Copying Announcements

Reusing content eliminates the need to create everything from scratch. This saves time and effort in the content development processes. To support reuse, instructors can now copy specific announcements or all announcements from another course. Instructors can copy Announcements from both Original and Ultra courses. When copied, each announcement will be set to draft.

This change improves the course rollover process. Instructors no longer need to reschedule or delete announcements immediately after copying. Instructors can take their time reviewing announcements and adjusting as needed.

Auto-Captioning for Video and Audio Feedback

Ensuring accessible and inclusive experiences for our students is of paramount importance. We have taken a significant step forward by implementing automatic captioning for audio and video content used in assessment feedback and announcements. This feature enhances accessibility and fosters inclusivity. Auto-captioning also supports diverse language preferences, aligning with the user’s chosen language in Learn.

Improved Progress Tracking For Graded LTI Content

Accurate course progress tracking is key for both students and instructors. Some instructors include graded LTI content in their course. In the past, progress tracking for graded LTI content was only updated manually by the student. Now when a student submits their work, their progress status updates to “complete.” This change ensures better reporting for instructors and accurate progress tracking for students.

Batch Edit Support For Items In Modules and Folders

Batch editing offers value by streamlining and expediting repetitive tasks. Batch edit actions now apply to all items inside of Folders and Learning Modules. 

With this change, all items are now visible on a single page. We have added the ability to expand and collapse Learning Modules and Folders.

Instructors can now perform the following tasks much faster:

• Shift Dates: Select all items and shift the dates forward before you adjust the dates for each item. This is helpful when needing to make sweeping date adjustments.

• Adjust Visibility: Select all items and set them to visible or hidden. This is helpful after course copies, imports, or conversions. In some copy cases, items are hidden by default. Instructors may want to make them visible.
• Remove date/time release conditions: Select all items and set them to visible or hidden. This is helpful when having trouble updating due dates. Due dates must be after the Show On date and before the Hide After date.

We have also made a couple of usability improvements: 

• Truncated Long Titles: Items with long titles would overlap with dates and times. Long titles are now truncated to prevent that from happening.
• Fixed Table Header: Batch Edit was difficult to use with courses that had a lot of items. Users would need to scroll to the top of the page to see the column title. The table header now follows the user as they scroll down the page.

• Replaced Dropdown: The batch edit actions available were not obvious. We have replaced the dropdown with individual buttons. The buttons do not become active until a user has selected items.

Users can select up to 100 items when performing a batch edit action.

New Blackboard blog

Blackboard Anthology is producing a corporate blog which will allow a quick grab/copy of screenshots for your change management initiatives. Please visit Anthology.com.

The August 2023 – V3900.71.0 release is robust with features in seven areas:

• Assessment and grading;
• Richer course and content;
• Data and analytics;

• Groups;
• Communications and social engagement;
• Mobile app; and
• Integration, extension and management

Below are the top five items the Blackboard team has selected to highlight for your information. Read the full V3900.71.0 release notes.

Learning Module image 

Learning Modules provide a way to organize and structure content. To enhance the visual aesthetics of a course and to aid in content identification, we now support the option to add images to Learning Modules.

• to add an image to a Learning Module, instructors can edit the module;
• instructors can drag and drop an image of their choice or upload one from their device;
• the image appears in preview. This helps the instructor ensure that the desired image is selected;

• instructors can drag the image and modify the zoom to select the focal point of the image; and
• instructors can mark the image as decorative or provide appropriate alternative text.

Flexible Grading

Flexible Grading is a new, efficient assessment grading experience. The new experience:

• provides intuitive and streamlined navigation;

• eliminates artificial barriers; and
• saves time and effort when navigating from student to student or question to question.

Flexible Grading capabilities:

• Grade by question or student
• Filter on grading status of choice

• Navigate between students and multiple submission attempts
• Keep track of your grading process
• View both the attempt and the final grade for each assessment
• Provide meaningful feedback with or without a rubric
• Grade inline using Blackboard Annotate

• Collapse side panels to view more of the student submission
• Post all grades when ready

Supported assessment grading configurations:

• Individual student test and assignment submissions
• Single and multiple attempts

• Grading with rubrics
• SafeAssign

Other assessment configurations will continue to route through to the current grading experience. There is no loss of grading functionality for these configurations:

• Anonymous submissions
• Group submissions

• Two graders per student
• Peer review

Flexible Grading will come to these assessment configurations in future releases.

Top Level Course Navigation

Groups are essential for fostering collaboration, promoting active learning, and deepening understanding of course material. In the past, instructors could define groups and group sets. Instructors could also create group assessments. This release includes improvements aimed at helping all users make better use of groups.

We’ve moved Groups from the Details & Actions menu to the top navigation bar. This improves the visibility and prominence of Groups.

This release also introduces a new feature for Groups: Group Spaces. This first milestone of Group Spaces provides a list of all assessments by group. 

From Manage groups, instructors still have access to:

• Group lists
• Show Members

• Group management options

To access a Group Space, instructors should select Enter Group Space from the group’s three-dot menu.

Instructors can access Group Spaces from the three-dot menu from Manage Groups.

Students can access their assigned groups on the Groups landing page. From there, students can view all student members of their group.

To access a Group Space, students should select the group’s name. Once in Group Spaces, students can access all assessments aligned to their Group.

Future milestones will include synchronous communication and project management tools for students.

New default cell status in Grid View

Instructors have varying preferences of the gradebook view. Some prefer the gradebook grid view to get an overview of student performance or locate new submissions. In the past, the gradebook grid view displayed Grade Now in each cell even when no submission had been made. This was confusing.

To remove confusion, the default state of a given cell in the gradebook grid view has changed from Grade now to – (a single dash). This change reduces the cognitive load on users working in the gradebook. This change also makes new submissions more obvious.

There is no change in gradebook functionality. Instructors can still select a given cell and enter an override grade.

Students with alert flags in the Course Activity Report

Identifying students at risk is challenging. This challenge is compounded when teaching multiple courses and large numbers of students.

Now, a flag appears for students with alerts in the Course Activity Report. Instructors can customize their course alerts based on the following:

• Number of days a student is inactive in the course
• A student’s overall grade in the course is below a specific percentage

The instructor may hover over a flag to view the alert type.

Instructors can filter alerts for:

• All students
• Students with alerts
• Students without alerts

Instructors can identify students with alerts in other views of the Course Activity Report.

• In the chart, purple dots indicate students with at least one (1) alert. Instructors can select the dot to display student information. An alerts section explains the applicable alerts for the student.
• In the CSV download, the Low overall grade and Last access alert columns indicate when a student has an alert.
• As before, activity stream notifications summarize students with alerts per course. Instructors may select these notifications to open the Course Activity Report. When accessing the report via notifications, the filter Students with alerts is auto-applied.

Key considerations:

• Instructors define Alerts Settings at a course level so that each course can have its own alerts values
• Five is the default value for the number of days a student is inactive alert; there is no default setting for overall grade alert
• Course alerts can be added, edited, and deleted at any time

New Blackboard blog

Blackboard Anthology is producing a corporate blog which will allow a quick grab/copy of screenshots for your change management initiatives. Please visit Anthology.com.

The July 2023 – V3900.69.0 release is robust with features in six areas:

• Assessment and grading;
• Richer course and content;
• Data and analytics;

• Mobile app;
• Integration, extension and management; and
• Course upgrading

Below are the top five items the Blackboard team has selected to highlight for your information. Read the full V3900.67.0 release notes.

Resizing media

Instructors often strive to include media in their course design to help create an engaging course. Students may desire to include media in their discussions or assessment responses. When inserting media, users expect an easy way to control the size of the included media. In the past, this wasn’t easy to do. Users would have to size media before uploading it in the course.

Now media items have handles in each corner. Users can resize the media by dragging a corner handle. Users can also resize media via keyboard navigation. Media types available for resizing include images, videos and media inserted via URL.

This enhancement provides users with a seamless and intuitive way to resize media.

Partial and negative credit improvements for the multiple choice/multiple select question type

Multiple choice and multiple answer questions are graded automatically. Answers are scored based on the instructor-selected scoring option.

In the past, instructors could select from the following scoring options:

• All or nothing. A student must select all the correct answer choices to receive credit. If a student selects one or more incorrect answer choices, they earn no points.
• Allow partial credit. A student receives partial credit if they correctly answer part of the question.

• Subtract points for incorrect answers. A student will have points subtracted for incorrect answer choices. This option discourages guessing. The overall question score is not less than zero.

With the partial credit and subtract points options, all answer choices were equally weighted. Instructors could not control how much partial and negative credit is awarded for each correct and incorrect answer.

To provide instructors with more control, we have made some changes. Now, instructors can turn on partial and negative credit. This option allows instructors to:

• define a positive percentage value to award credit for a correct answer(s)
• enter a negative percentage value to subtract for an incorrect answer(s)
• allow a negative overall score for the question

This improvement reduced the number of default answer options from four to three. Instructors can still add additional answer options, if required.

Tab navigation for assessments 

We have simplified the navigation for assessments. Instructors now have convenient access to different sections using tabs:

• Content and Settings
• Submissions
• Student Activity
• Question Analysis

This improvement is designed to optimize instructor efficiency. It provides a more streamlined assessment management experience for instructors.

Complete/incomplete grade schema

The complete/incomplete grade schema is now available for the Ultra Course View. This grade schema helps to shift the focus from points earned to student effort and completion of tasks. It offers a more holistic approach to assessing student progress.

Instructors can select the schema in the settings panel from the Grade using section. When a grade is assigned, a checkmark is displayed on that item for the student in the gradebook. An incomplete is displayed as a dash in a grey-coloured pill.

Progress tracking and start/continue/completed options for learning modules

Progress tracking provides students with clear visibility of their progress throughout a course. In the past, students would need to expand the module to view progress for the contents of a learning module. To save time and provide greater clarity, a progress summary for learning modules is now displayed at the top level.

New Blackboard blog

Blackboard Anthology is producing a corporate blog which will allow a quick grab/copy of screenshots for your change management initiatives. Please visit Anthology.com.

The June 2023 – 3900.67 release is robust with features in six areas:

• Assessment and grading;
• Richer course and content;
• Data and analytics;
• Communication and social engagement;
• Integration, extension, and management; and
• Course upgrading

Below are the top five items the Blackboard team has selected to highlight for your information. Read the full 3900.67 release notes.

Announcements in the top navigation bar

To provide a better user experience, we moved Announcements from the Details & Actions menu to the top navigation bar. This reduces the number of items within the Details & Actions menu. This change also improves visibility and prominence of Announcements. Users will be able to access announcements anywhere from within a course. All existing functionality of announcements remains the same.

Additional level of content nesting 

At present, Blackboard Ultra supports up to three levels of hierarchy for content nesting on the course content page. We’ve received consistent feedback from students indicating that they prefer this structure. Many have shared that it improves course navigation. Instructors have shared the same and cited it helps them easily design and layout their courses.

We’ve also heard that some institutions need more than three levels of content nesting to structure their course content. To address this feedback, we’ve added an option to use one additional level of content nesting. This extra level provides instructors with greater flexibility to organize content in ways that better suit their needs. The option to use one more level of content nesting improves the overall usability of the platform for some of our users. Opting for the extra level of content nesting also reduces the flattening effect of content when upgrading courses from the Original to Ultra course view.

Course links improvements

To provide a better experience, we’ve made a series of improvements for course links:

• Instructors have the option to add course links to folders and learning modules on the Course Content page. The option to add course links to folders and learning modules is hidden for nested content containers.
• Instructors cannot move into another folder or learning module a course link to a folder or learning module. A warning message displays if an instructor tries to move a course link in this way.
• Instructors cannot copy into another folder or learning module a course link to a folder or learning module. The option to copy course links to folders and LMs is hidden if an instructor selects the Copy Content option from the + menu while inside a folder or learning module.
• To help users identify course links to folders and learning modules, we have made a new icon. This icon displays a link at the top left corner of the icon for a folder or learning module. In the past, the learning module didn’t have an icon. Learning modules now have an icon, which is the same one displayed for learning modules on the Create Item panel.
• The context menu for a course link to a folder or a learning module now provides these options:
  • Edit Course Link
  • Edit Linked Folder or Learning Module
  • Delete Course Link
• Users can expand a course link to a folder or learning module as they would a folder or learning module. This allows the user to view the nested contents of the target folder or learning module. The contents displayed are read only. An instructor cannot modify the nested contents displayed for the course link. An instructor cannot move additional content into the folder or learning module course link.
• When an instructor makes changes to the nested contents of a folder or learning module, the changes will appear for any related, expanded course link. These changes include:
  • adding/deleting nested contents
  • re-ordering nested contents
  • moving additional contents into the target folder or learning module
  • editing the names of nested contents
  • modifying the visibility or release conditions of nested contents
• In the past, if an instructor copied a course link to an Ultra Document, some of the contents added via Add Content did not copy. This has been fixed. Now the Ultra Document and its contents, along with the course link, are copied as expected.
• When creating a Course Link, an instructor can now select a folder and/or learning module from the Category section of Search Criteria. Additionally, instructors can expand the folders and learning modules in the search results to select one of its contents.
• When upgrading an Original course to the Ultra course view, course links to folders and learning modules are not retained. The conversion report includes an exception for course links and explains their removal.

Upload questions from a file to tests and assignments

Besides course content, assessment questions are one of the most valuable teaching artifacts. Up until now, instructors could only create new questions in tests, assignments or question banks. This process could be time-consuming and inefficient.
 
Now instructors can author questions offline in a text file. Instructors can upload the file into a test for a more streamlined test building workflow. Each question file must be a tab-delimited TXT file. The file should not exceed 250 records to avoid time-out restrictions. For more details on formatting requirements, please review the related Help pages for Original and Ultra platforms.

Instructors can easily edit and use the uploaded questions as they would a question created in a test. Uploading questions saves instructors valuable time and effort.

Supported question types include:

• multiple choice/multiple answer
• true/false
• essay
• fill in the blank
• fill in multiple blanks
• numeric response
• matching

Add exceptions from the Gradebook Grid view and the Student Overview page

We all live complicated lives and special circumstances often arise. When this happens, instructors may need to grant an exception to a student for specific tests or assignments. These exceptions may include the following:

• providing additional attempts
• rescheduling due dates, or
• granting extended access.

These exceptions are available even if the assessment is hidden from other students. Until now, exceptions were only accessible from the submissions page for an assessment. Now, instructors can access the exceptions workflow from the gradebook grid view and Student Overview page.

New Blackboard blog

Starting this month, Blackboard Anthology is producing a corporate blog which will allow a quick grab/copy of screenshots for your change management initiatives. Please visit Anthology.com.

The May 2023 – 3900.65 release is robust with features in five areas:

• Assessment and grading;
• Richer course and content;
• Data and analytics;

• Integration, extension, and management; and
• Course upgrading

Below are the top five items the Blackboard team has selected to highlight for your information. Read the full 3900.65 release notes.

Drag and drop desktop folders to upload to the Course Content page

Efficiency is key for instructors when creating course content. To assist with this, we’ve added a drag and drop support for uploading folders with files to the Course Content page. Instructors may drag and drop a folder from their computer to the Course Content page. If an instructor drags and drops more than 25 files at the same time, a warning message appears. This message doesn’t restrict the upload, but it informs the user that it may take a few minutes to complete. During the upload process, the instructor can cancel at any time. If the upload is canceled, the files are deleted.

Instructor’s notes on Student Overview

Teaching many courses is challenging. Keeping track of student details can be even harder. To help, we’ve created a dedicated space for instructors to take notes about students in each course. These notes are private. Only instructors, administrators, and higher roles can access them. To access the notes, instructors may select the Notes tab on the Student Overview page. From there, an instructor can add notes and review any other notes for a student in that course. They can also review notes added by other instructors in the same course. The text editor for notes includes basic formatting options such as bold, italics, colours, styles and font size. The most recent notes appear at the top of the list.

These notes have many possible uses:

• Tracking the evolution of a student’s progress over time;
• Noting agreements with a student, such as extensions on assignments or meeting times;
• Noting students with behavioural issues or a history of academic dishonesty; and/or
• Recording considerations for grading, such as student athletes.

Key considerations:

• Each note includes the author’s name and a timestamp with its creation date.
• If a note is edited, a separate timestamp for the latest edition is added. This helps instructors keep track of changes.
• Authors can edit and delete their own notes.
• Instructors in the course cannot edit or delete another instructor’s notes.
• Instructors, teaching assistants, facilitators, and grader roles can view all notes in their course and create, edit, and delete self-authored notes.
• Administrators may delete any note.
• Administrators may also assign the privilege to delete notes to other roles.
• An administrator can grant view only privileges. 

Question banks – Reuse Questions option

Aside from course content, test questions are some of the most valuable resources in a course. Instructors invest significant time and effort creating and refining banks of test questions. Instructors use these banks to easily reuse questions across various assessments. Now instructors can copy questions between question banks. To copy a question, an instructor can select the new Reuse Questions option. Additionally, instructors can copy questions from existing assessments directly into their question banks. This process makes it easier to build and expand question libraries.

Hotspot question zoom in/out

When assessing a student’s knowledge of visual content, the hotspot question type is a popular choice. To further enhance this question type, we have added two new features: Zoom In/Out and Full-Screen view. These controls enable instructors to define hotspots more precisely. These new controls are also accessible using convenient keyboard shortcuts.

Improved conversion for Discussion Forums and Threads

Discussion Forums in the Original Course View are an essential feature. Instructors often create discussion prompts as threads within a forum. Students respond by creating a thread or replying to existing threads in the forum. In other cases, Discussion Forums serve as containers. Instructors create a thread for each discussion prompt within the forum. Students respond to the discussion prompt by replying to the thread. To better support each of these use cases, we have updated our conversion process. Now, when the “allow members to create new threads” setting is selected, the Discussion Forum converts to a Discussion in the Ultra Course View. If this setting is not selected, the Discussion Forum will become a folder in the Ultra Course View. All threads within the forum convert to Discussions inside the folder. 

The April 2023 – 3900.62 release is robust with features in five areas:

• Assessment and grading;
• Richer course and content;

• Data and analytics;
• Integration, extension and management; and
• Course upgrading.

Below are the top five items the Blackboard team has selected to highlight for your information. Read the full 3900.62 release notes.

Multiple grading schemas: Add, edit, copy

In the past, Ultra courses allowed only one grading schema per course. Now instructors can add, copy and edit up to 100 grading schemas per course. Items copied from other courses will keep their grading schemas. When copying, any configured schemas copy even if not aligned to gradable items. Instructors can now choose the best grading schema for each assessment in a course.

Gradable Items View usability improvements

It’s important for the gradebook to support efficient workflows. We’ve made several improvements to improve the Gradable Items View:

• Instructors can now sort the records of any column on this page. Sorting helps instructors more easily find the desired information. For example, instructors may sort on Grading Status to locate assessments that need grading.

• Selecting the assessment name now navigates the instructor to the selected assessment.
• Selecting ‘# to grade’ now navigates to a Needs Grading filtered Submissions page. This provides instructors with quick entry into the grading process.
• The new Post column provides instructors with status information for an assessment. This also simplifies the action to post all grades for the assessment.

Course content title search

It’s sometimes difficult to remember the location of a course item. In the past, locating an item was a time-intensive task and unintuitive. Searching for the item would involve opening every folder or learning module to find the item.

You can now search course content titles to find these items on the course content page. The course search icon, a magnifying glass, is easy to find at the top of the course content page. When a user types a few letters, the course search function displays a list of matching items by title. A user may expand the search results to view more information related to the course item(s).

Discussion navigation improvements

Instructors often review various aspects of course discussions to assess and engage students. To improve navigation and increase visibility, we have introduced a new tab navigation:

• Discussion
• Student Activity

• Grading & Participation

Course Activity Report accessibility improvements

We commit to providing accessible and inclusive solutions for all users. Many users navigate Ultra using assistive technologies. To better support instructors using assistive technology, we have made several accessibility improvements to the Course Activity Report:

• The description of the Course Activity Report includes a Learn more link. Now the screen reader states this link, directing the instructor to the related Help documentation.
• Instructors can sort data on any column. Now screen readers indicate if column sorting is in ascending or descending order.

• Instructors can select many students to send messages. Now screen readers state the number of students selected.
• Screen readers now state when an instructor selects or deselects all students.
• In medium and small screens some options of the Course Activity Report combine in a single drop-down menu. Now screen readers state that the three-dot menu contains more options.

On March 4, Blackboard was updated with Release 3900.60 with features in six areas: 

• Assessment and grading;
• Data and analytics;
• Mobile app;
• Integration, extension and management;
• Communication and social engagement; and
• Course upgrading.

Below are the top five items the Blackboard team has selected to highlight for your information. Read the full 3900.60 release notes.

Improved attempt switching when grading student submissions with multiple attempts

Multiple-attempt assessments can be more complicated for instructors because there are more submissions. To switch between attempts for a student in the past, an instructor would have to close an attempt then select a different attempt. This wasn’t intuitive and required extra clicks. Now instructors can navigate directly between a student’s attempts. If a student has multiple attempts for an assessment, an instructor will see an option to switch attempts. This is more efficient. When the instructor clicks a student name in the Submissions list, the most recent submitted attempt will be loaded. 

The attempt selector displays information to help instructors select the desired attempt: 

• Attempt number 
• Submission time stamp 

• File size 
• Grade (if graded) 
• Late indicator (if applicable) 

Course activity report table enhancements

The course activity page helps instructors understand students’ performance. With this information, instructors can: 

• Identify struggling or high performing students based on their grade, hours in course, or days of inactivity. 
• Message students who have a low grade and/or have not accessed the course recently. 
• Receive alerts when a student has not accessed their course in a while or if a student’s grade has dropped.

With this update, we have made the following improvements:
 
New Table – Updated to be more consistent with other features. Those who use progress tracking will find the feel of the new table should be familiar. The new table makes it easier to select and message students. 
 
New Days of Inactivity column – the number of days since a student last accessed your course. Instructors can use this information to identify students that might be falling behind. 
 
Access Student Overview – click or tap a student’s name to see their grades, progress, and activity over the weeks. Instructors can use the Student Overview to get a full picture of a student’s performance and engagement in a course.

Sorting on overall grade column in the Gradebook student list view

Instructors need sorting controls in the Gradebook. These sorting options are helpful for organizing the Gradebook data for various contexts: 

• identifying students with grades at a grade boundary
• ordering students from highest to lowest grade, or vice versa

Now instructors can sort the Gradebook Students list view on the Overall Grade column. Any sorting applied yields a temporary change to the sort order of all columns.

Reschedule announcements 

Instructors have not had the ability to reschedule announcements. If the show on and hide after date fields were set for the future, a pop-up window would not generate. Instructors prefer a pop-up window because it helps students see the announcement. If there is no pop-up, a student may not know there is an announcement for them to view.

Some instructors were recreating announcements from scratch to generate these pop-ups. With this update, instructors can now reschedule announcements without having to recreate them. They can do this by changing the show on and hide after fields to a future date.

When users first enter a course, the rescheduled announcement will trigger a pop-up.

Discussions – Deactivate post activity 

Before this release, the only way to prevent posts in a discussion was by defining a due date. Instructors now have a checkbox option in the Discussion Settings panel. When checked, participants cannot edit or delete posts in a discussion.

On Feb. 3, Blackboard was updated with Release 3900.58 with features in five areas: 

• Assessment and grading;

• Data and analytics;
• Groups;
• Mobile app; and
• Integration, extension and management.

Below are the top five items the Blackboard team has selected to highlight for your information. Read the full 3900.58 release notes.

Exemptions

There are times that instructors need to exempt students from assessments or activities in the course. Now instructors can provide exemptions. Students can view exempted items. A student is not expected to complete an exempted task. When exempted, a student’s overall calculation will adjust for them. The overall points possible or weighting for a student with exemptions may change compared to other students. 

Instructors may exempt any gradebook item in two ways: 

• From the submission list view, select the ellipsis menu of a student and choose to add or edit the exemption. 
• From the student detail view, select the ellipsis menu of the item and choose to add or edit the exemption.

When exempting an item, the item will not be: 

• included in the overall grade calculation;
• marked late for students who do not make a submission; or 
• assigned an automatic zero.

Students can still supply submissions for exempted items. Instructors can grade and provide feedback for these submissions.

Extra credit questions in assessments

There are times when instructors allow students to overachieve on an assessment. Some instructors may allow students to earn back points lost on other assessments or activities.

Now instructors can assign one or more questions as extra credit in an assessment. A correct answer results in adding the extra credit question points to the points earned for the assessment. Students are not penalized for incorrect answers to an extra credit question. In other words, points are not deducted because the question is excluded from the assessment’s possible points. If a student answers extra credit questions correctly, it may be possible for the student to earn a score greater than 100 per cent on the assessment.

Students can discern how many extra credit points are available on the assessment. While students are taking an assessment, they can identify questions designated as extra credit. Students can also filter the test to find extra credit questions if present.

Hotspot question

Instructors may want to assess a student’s knowledge of visual content. The hotspot question type is popular for this type of assessment. This question type is also good for reducing the potential of cueing or guessing.

Hotspot questions present an image without any answer options for students to choose. Students must mark a certain area of the image that is within the area the instructor defined as correct.

Building on the initial hotspot question introduced in the 3900.52.0 release, we’re adding two enhancements to this question type:

• A new polygon shape selector can be used to draw more complex shapes.
• Improved keyboard controls. Instructors can now create and place new hotspot shapes on the image canvas directly via the keyboard.

In Original Course View, instructors can only create hotspot questions using a mouse. In the Ultra Course View, instructors can create the hotspot question using a mouse or keyboard. Students may answer hotspot questions via a mouse or keyboard.

Show course group members

Instructors and students need to see group memberships. In the past, there wasn’t an obvious way for instructors and students to see the members in a group.

From the Course Groups page, users may expand a group set to see a list of groups. Now each group has a Show Members option. Group members are listed alphanumerically in a panel. Users may search for a specific group member. A future release will provide profile cards and options for messaging group members from the search results.

Note: Students see only the groups and members for groups where they have membership.

Progress tracking: Ally alternative format views count towards progress

An accurate representation of course progress is key for both instructors and students. With this latest addition, any Ally alternative format accessed by a student will reflect in their presented course progress.

Students will: 

• see the progress indicator updated to “started” as they download an alternative format using Ally.
• be able to mark an item as complete after accessing any alternative format.

Instructors will see the progress made by each one of their students based on access to the original file or an alternative format.

On Jan. 12, Blackboard was updated with Release 3900.56 with features in five areas: 

• Assessment and grading;
• Richer course and content design;
• Mobile app;
• Integration, extension and management; and
• Course upgrading.

Below are the top five items the Blackboard team has selected to highlight for your information. Read the full 3900.56 release notes.

Essay question model answer

Instructors want to ensure that they grade students’ work fairly and consistently. This can be especially challenging when evaluating student responses to essay questions. Instructors like to have a reference while grading. Now instructors can include a model answer for essay questions. Instructors and graders can see this when grading. 

Students can see the model answer when reviewing their results if the test is configured to show correct answers. Students don’t see the model answer when they take a test.

Test question and page randomization

Instructors randomize test questions to improve academic integrity. In the past, instructors couldn’t randomize questions if the test contained text blocks, files, or images.

Now instructors can enable randomization when the test has text blocks, files or images. The non-question elements are locked in place. The test randomizes questions between those non-question elements.

Instructors can also randomize questions in a test that contains page breaks. Questions randomize within their assigned page. If a page contains non-question elements, the questions randomize between those elements.

When there are pages for the test, instructors can also randomize page order. If instructors randomize the page order, they can also lock the first page into position. This is useful when the first page is a cover page or contains test instructions.

Progress tracking: Status and filters for group submissions

Instructors need clear information about the status of group progress on an assessment. In the past, the submission view of assessments and discussions included two status columns:

• Student status
• Grading status

Now we also show both in the group submission page. This gives instructors greater clarity into group work status. We also separated the filter to allow compound filtering of student and grading statuses. The default filter shows everything. The filter resets every time an instructor accesses the submission view.

Improvements to messages recipient types by course role

In the past an all course members recipient type appeared for all course users. Students could send messages to all course users, on accident or on purpose.

Now students can only send messages to:

• all instructors
• selected course members

Instructors can send messages to:

• all course members
• all instructors
• all students
• selected course members

Additional improvements to unsupported text colour removal

The Original Course View allows instructors to choose any colour for text. This content may be difficult to read or not accessible. Ultra Course View has a curated set of text colours to ensure readability: black, gray, purple, blue and green. During conversion, we remove unsupported text colours. This text becomes black.

This release adds several areas where text colours are corrected for readability:

• Journals
•  Groups within group sets
•  Tests

We remove unsupported text colours during conversion from the following:

• Announcements
• Discussions
• Assignments
• Documents
• Journals
• Groups and Group Sets
• Tests and Question Types

September 2022 highlights

The current student and instructor Blackboard apps (iOS and Android) will end Sept. 30. We encourage faculty to download the NEW Blackboard unified app to replace the older versions.

August 2022 highlights

• Rubrics can now be copied between courses. (Original and Ultra)
• Question banks can now be sorted in Ultra. (Ultra only)
• Discussion replies are available on individual discussion grading pages. (Ultra only)
• Summary list of annotations for inline grading now available. (Original and Ultra)
• Easier access for students to assignment and assessment feedback. (Original and Ultra)
• Microsoft Immersive Reader now added to Ally. (Original and Ultra)
• Display name choice added including preferred name and pronouns. (Original and Ultra)

July 2022 highlights

• Question bank updates! Instructors can now create new, empty question banks in their Ultra courses, view, and search for questions within a question bank, and add, edit, and delete all aspects of a question within new and existing question banks. (Original and Ultra)
• Due date exceptions. Now instructors may accommodate special circumstances by also allowing due date exceptions (Original and Ultra)
• Auto save enhancements for students. There work is auto saved every two seconds when using a content editor tool (Original and Ultra)
• Better cloud integration added for Microsoft. (Original and Ultra)
• Changes to Delete Student Preview mode data. Deletion now includes data removal from the roster, gradebook, gradebook filter, messages, messages recipient, discussions, journals, and conversations. (Original and Ultra)
• Microsoft Teams integration added to Ultra. (Ultra only)
• New unified Blackboard app – replacing the individual student and faculty apps. (Original and Ultra)
• File upload indicator added. An upload animation added when files are uploaded through assignment submission, as a content item, a discussion board posting and a SCORM package.

May 2022 highlights

• Undo and redo in Bb Annotate added. (Original and Ultra)
• New Test Question filtering added! “The question filter supports common test taking strategies. For example, students may complete questions they know first and skip harder ones. The filter enables students to quickly return to skipped questions. Students may also use the filter to find essay questions. If a student submits a test with unanswered questions, a warning will alert the student. The alert shows the number of unanswered questions. The student may choose to submit the test or keep working. If the student chooses to keep working, the unanswered questions filter auto applies. The unanswered questions display automatically. In response to student feedback, students may now choose to hide the timer in timed tests. This may help to reduce pressure and anxiety during assessments. When students hide the timer, the timer icon stays visible. Students may view the remaining time as needed”. (Original and Ultra)
• Session time-out warning added which appears after a period of three hours. This is tool dependent. (Original and Ultra)
• The Content Editor in Original courses allows users to add image attributes, but now it also supports adding the “title” attribute. (Original and Ultra)