Introduction
As part of our ongoing series of Blackboard updates, this blog post provides a quick summary of some of the recent enhancements Anthology has made to Blackboard.
If you prefer, you can watch a short video that covers the updates:
Video Link: https://teesside.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=5f87f22a-3d85-4acc-a9b0-b37500cace3e
Activity Page Optimization
What was the Activity Stream has now been rebranded as Activity. If you’ve not explored it before, it provides a digest of activity in all the modules you are involved in. Now, the interface provides a section on recent Course Activity as well as the familiar Activity Stream. The Course Activity serves up your most active modules, providing you with shortcuts to items to grade, messages and any alerts you might have set.
Announcements Review Tool
Making Announcements are a powerful and effective way to communicate with your students. Previously, Blackboard presented you with a number of students who had read any Announcements made in a module. Now, this functionality has been extended. When you check an Announcement, you can not only see how many students have read it but apply a filter to identify those who have Read/Not Read the Announcement.
Learning Modules – Adding Table of Contents
When accessing content within Learning Modules, Blackboard now provides a collapsible Table of Contents. This now makes it much easier for students to navigate content (providing Forced Sequence is not applied).
Learning Modules – Assessments
When adding assessments within a Learning Module, they now open up in a full panel. This allows students to focus on the assessment itself, with no clutter or distractions.
Documents – New Style Options
If you use Blackboard documents, you might be interested in the ability to create a block style for content items. You can now choose from a range of styles (Question, Tip, Key Point and Next Steps) to go alongside your text. This provides a consistent iconography in your module, allowing students to identify at a glance the nature of the content.
Documents – Design Assist Enhancement
Also available within Documents, the Design Assist tool provides the option to autogenerate the layout of your content. This can bring in images from Unsplash as well as generate a Knowledge Check. Simply click the Auto-generate layout button, and let Blackboard do the rest. If you don’t like the results, click Generate to try again or Cancel the layout to apply your own layout.
Pop out Rubrics for grading Group Submissions
Previously, it was only possible to “pop-out” a rubric for a regular, non-group assignment. A very handy feature, especially for those of us fortunate to have multiple screens, this functionality has now been extended to Group Assignments.
Tagging Questions
When creating questions (both in Tests and Questions Banks), you now have the ability to add “metadata”. This metadata can then be used later to quickly identify questions, appearing as selectable filters. For example, you can now tag a question as something like “simple” or “advanced” to help differentiate the complexity of a question. Alternatively, you could use topics to tag questions, allowing you to select them at a later date.
Fill in the blank improvement
Finally, for those of you who use “fill in the blank” questions when creating quizzes, Blackboard has increased their functionality for those students who use screen readers by adding hidden ARIA labels. Additionally, the overall look has been improved by displaying the blanks in line with the surrounding text, whether the question is presented as a sentence, paragraph, or table.
Get in touch!
If you’d like to discuss any of the above, or indeed anything to do with Digital Pedagogy, please don’t hesitate to contact the Digital Learning Team at elearning@tees.ac.uk. We’d love to hear from you!