This week’s Blackboard Learn updates

The Blackboard Learn release on Sep. 3 includes these enhancements. We’re on the SaaS (Software as a Service) platform, which means Blackboard provides updates on the first Thursday of each month. Here are some highlights:

Protect assessments with access codes:
Instructors can now add a system-generated access code for their assessments in the Ultra Course View.

Automated test question feedback:
Instructors rely on automated feedback in Original to provide focused feedback on individual test questions without needing to type feedback for each question on each submission. With this release, automated test question feedback is now available in Ultra courses. Instructors can enter feedback for correct and incorrect answers on auto-graded question types (such as True/False). Students will automatically receive the feedback when they submit the assessment.

Send course announcement by email:
To be sure Ultra course announcements reach as many students as possible, we’ve added the ability to send course announcements by email. Emails about Ultra announcements are always sent and aren’t controlled by the global notification settings. Instructors also receive a copy as the email is sent to all course members. In the email, embedded content appears as links. Students can select the links to view the content.

Student list view in the gradebook:
With this release, we’ve added a new view option in the gradebook for Ultra courses. The new view, called student list view, improves gradebook performance in courses with very large enrollment numbers. In the student list view tab, instructors can see rows for each student in addition to a tab with rows for gradebook items.

Full release notes are available on Blackboard’s Help site: help.blackboard.com/Learn/Administrator/SaaS/Release_Notes.

OWU Sponsoring Organization/Office: Information Services.
Contact: David Soliday at helpdesk@owu.edu