The September updates to Blackboard will introduce several significant improvements that will benefit academics, students, and course administrators. These updates focus on enhancing instructional design, improving the course content page, and supporting learner progression.
Course Content Page Enhancements
As a result of staff and student feedback Blackboard have introduced some changes to the appearance of the Course Content Page.
The updated Content Page now features several design changes: the Details and Actions menu has been moved to the right-hand side, extra space has been added around the course banner, and images now have rounded edges with a subtle drop shadow effect. The + button menu has been relocated to the left-hand side, and the icons have been made smaller for a cleaner look. The changes look particularly appealing when a course makes use of Learning Modules images and descriptions which is best practice.
- Moving the menu to the right ensures that the course content is the first thing students will look at.
- Greater visual distinction between learning modules and folders.
- Intuitive navigation reduces cognitive load and increases focus on the content.
For further guidance see Course Content Page Enhancements
Content Designer: Knowledge Check in Documents
Further to the recent update to the Content Designer for Documents, the latest addition to enhance the learning experience is a knowledge check block. Add a multiple choice or multiple answer questions with pre-populated correct and incorrect feedback. Students then receive immediate feedback and have unlimited attempts at completing the questions.
Academics can get detailed metrics including:
- Number of students participating & total number of attempts.
- Average & maximum number of attempts to reach the correct answer
- Level of difficulty metric
- Percentage of students selecting each answer option.
For further guidance see Create Documents
View items that “Need marking” and “Need posting” in the new Overview tab
In the gradebook tab you will notice there is a new Overview tab containing two sections: Needs Marking and Needs Posting.
Needs Marking allows you to see all items ready for marking and a count of the total number of outstanding marking tasks in your course.
Late submissions will also be included in the Needs Marking section of the Gradebook.
Needs Posting allows you to quickly identify which grades need posting (Only use this if you want to post immediately, you can ignore this if you have set a feedback release date).
View a Student Activity Log
To review student activity on a particular course the Student Overview page now has a Student Activity Log. Academics/course administrators can use the report to check what a particular student did in a course.
The easiest way to access Student Activity Log is from the Gradebook. Opening the Students tab and clicking on a student’s name will open the Student Overview page. From there you will notice the Activity Log tab.
The Activity Log can be filtered by different event types and displays data from the past 140 days. Any information older than 140 days is not stored in the log. Additionally, it may take up to 20 minutes for the log to update after a student performs an action.
For further guidance see Student Activity Log