Learning Edge

Improving the student experience, including their experience of organisation and management, is very important.

Student feedback shows there are a few things that they would appreciate from your Blackboard areas. In this post we show how you could make some quick changes that would help students.

1. Identify the module leader clearly.

If a number of staff have access to your Blackboard area, you can still ensure it is clear who the actual module leader is. The Display the Module Leader to Students (0:35) video shows you how to do this by adding a ‘Primary Instructor’.

2. Include a module leader image.

You can upload a profile picture in Blackboard, so that you don’t appear as a grey face. This profile picture appears in various contexts throughout Blackboard such as the Course Staff area, and the Discussion tool. Watch the Adding a Profile Image to Blackboard (0:38) video, and add one now. This only needs doing once and the image will be seen in all Blackboard areas.

3. Make session details more visible.

You could make session details more visible by adding the timetable to the top of the page, and add the key details to the title, and description.

For very basic course timetables it is possible to put time, date, and location of sessions in the Course Schedule feature. The Course Schedule Feature in Blackboard (1:23) shows how this works. Note that this doesn’t take ‘reading weeks’/weeks-off into consideration, and will still create Blackboard calendar entries for those weeks.

4. Make contact details more visible.

You could include your contact details in the description for your ‘Information’ Learning Module.

Some people like to add text to their course images/banners, and some have included email addresses on these. We have a video guide and a template that you can use to help you add text to the image without sections of it being cut off for some users. Remember that text added this way can be too small and so not accessible (particularly on mobile devices) so we do not recommend doing this. As with all online images alternative text should be added when they are added to Blackboard for those who use assistive software like screen readers.

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

The Flexible Grading view has now been added to Blackboard.

Essentially Flexible Grading means you have the option to mark tests by student or by question. For example if you want to mark everyone’s answers to question one before moving on to question two, the workflow is now quick and simple.

Flexible Grading makes small changes to the marking view for Tests and Assignments, but does not affect Turnitin. Blackboard’s short introductory video shows how the new Flexible Grading view will look.

The update includes other features that could improve your workflow, such as the ‘Marking Status’ drop down option that allows you to just see the student submissions and questions that need marking.

See the Blackboard ‘Grade Tests With Flexible Grading‘ page for more detailed information.

By Peter Beaumont, Learning Technology Development Officer