July 2024 Updates
These are the latest BlackBoard updates, which will be live on our system from 8th August 2024.
Instructors
Content Designer: Enhanced Documents
There are now significant enhancements to Documents to provide new and robust options for content design. These enhancements work beautifully using a mouse, trackpad, or the keyboard and are mobile friendly for instructors and students.
Improved navigation between students in Flexible Grading
To make the grading experience more efficient, Next Student and Previous Student buttons have been added to the Students tab in Flexible Grading. Instructors can now quickly navigate between students when grading assessments.
Hide unenrolled students from the gradebook
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 Course settings or 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.
Status information removed from the gradebook download file
Instructors can download the full gradebook or selected columns to work with the information offline.
We’ve removed from the download file status information associated with grades. Removing this information makes it easier to perform statistical analysis or calculations. We also ensured that instructors can download the gradebook for completed courses.
Image Generation Improvements
Images enhance comprehension and engagement with course content. To help, we introduced the ability for instructors to generate images using the AI Design Assistant.
We are updating the technology in the image generation process from DALL-E 2 to DALL-E 3 allowing instructors to generate higher quality, higher resolution images in the following workflows:
- Learning Module images
- Document images
- Announcement images
- Assessment question images
- Journal prompts images
Instructors & Students
Anonymous student responses for Forms
Instructors can now collect anonymous submissions in Forms. The new Anonymous submissions option appears in the Grading & Submissions section of Form Settings.
When you select Anonymous submissions, these settings are enabled by default:
- Due date
- Prohibit late submissions
- Prohibit new attempts after due date
- Complete/incomplete is selected as the grading schema for non-graded forms
- When grading, the submission earns the points assigned; you can’t edit or override the points earned
Additional important details to note:
- Anonymous forms cannot be administered to groups.
- Class conversations are not supported when Anonymous submissions is selected.
- To ensure anonymity, student activity, exceptions, exemptions and accommodations are not supported.
- To ensure anonymity, student progress/statistics are not captured.
- Modifications to form questions and settings are not permitted if the form has submissions and the due date has passed.
Improvements to creating assignments
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.
All Users
Ability to ‘Follow’ Discussions for Enhanced Engagement Assessment
Users can re-engage when they know there are new posts by following the discussion.
Key Enhancements:
- Follow Discussions: Users can follow select discussions and receive notifications for new contributions from peers or instructors.
- User Notification Settings: New notification options for the Activity Stream settings allow users to manage notification types for discussions:
- Activity on my responses
- Activity on responses I have replied to
- Responses from instructors
- Responses for followed discussions
- Replies for followed discussions
- Administrator Settings: New administrator controls allow institutions to set defaults for the above user settings:
- Discussion activity on the current user’s responses
- Discussion activity on responses the current user has replied to
- Discussion responses from instructors
- Discussion responses and replies for followed
Send a message to a group from Group Spaces
Users can now send a group message from the members page of a group space encouraging collaboration on content that they have been assigned. 