Blackboard services were
unavailable Saturday, May 20 for a significant
upgrade to version 7.1, application pack 1.
To hear an audio summary of what's
new with version 7.1,
click here [mp3 format - play time = 16:30]
Here is a printed summary of
changes from the instructor/student perspective:
1) The look and feel of the
discussion board is significantly improved:
-
It is now possible to
associate gradebook grades with discussion
forums and even threads.
-
Discussion board statistics
are now available, showing, for each student:
-
Discussion board forums may
now be moderated.
-
Discussion board forums may
now be managed by students as well as
instructors, at the instructor's prerogative.
-
Posts to discussion boards may
now be rated with a 5-star system for purposes
of peer review.
-
Threads within discussion
boards are now subscribable. Users who
subscribe to a thread will be emailed when new
postings are made to it.
-
Discussion board forums are
now copyable.
-
Posts to discussion boards can
now be saved as drafts, visible only to the
student and instructor, before they are posted
publicly.
-
Discussion board forums now
have the availability options that other
Blackboard features have, so that they can be
made available for posting only within defined
times.
-
Adaptive release rules are now
available in discussion boards.
-
Search criteria can now be
focused or expanded within a discussion board.
-
Discussion board posts can now
be grouped into "collections," which can be
sorted and filtered into a customized view for
printing.
-
Discussion board forums can
now be locked, to prevent further postings, but
still be available, so that all can read posts.
2) The visual text box
editor (wysiwyg input area) is now cross-browser,
cross-platform compliant.
-
On the Windows platform, the
visual text box editor is compatible with:
-
The following browsers are
supported on the Macintosh OS:
-
Safari 2.0
-
Mozilla Firefox 1.0
-
The WebEQ and MathML tools in
the visual text box editor have been enhanced.
3) Several new features are
now available with assessments and the gradebook:
-
Assessments may now be set to
allow unlimited or multiple attempts. The
gradebook displays all attempts and overall
score can be set to last attempt, first attempt,
highest score, lowest score, or average of
scores. There is also an override field
for instructor use.
-
Self-assessment is now a
deployment option for tests, and can be set to
let instructor and student view the grade, or
only student.
-
Tests and surveys may now be
imported/exported as with the pool manager in
version 6 of Blackboard.
-
A new "extra credit" question
type is now possible in tests, which means the
points possible for a test will not include the
points for the extra credit question.
-
Feedback options have been
enhanced to allow any sort of feedback for any
test.
-
Submission reports for
assessments now contain full student data with
date/time stamps.
4) New language packs are
available for traditional Chinese and Arabic.
5) Spell check is now
present in all places where email is used, and in
other key areas.
The above changes were discussed
by David Gray in his Blackboard feature of the week
in the Academic Technology podcast,
episode 16.
In addition to these changes from
Blackboard, we also installed the Horizon Wimba Live
Classroom and Horizon Wimba voice tools, and these
are now available to faculty.
Click here to learn more about these products.
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Blackboard
Upgraded to ver. 7.1 with Building Block enhancements
