Blackboard 7.3 was recently made available general release, and Academic Computing is busy putting it through its paces. Our goal right now is to evaluate the changes and make sure all our customizations and 3rd party tools work properly. In particular we’re checking and double checking eGrades. Once all that’s done, we’ll do a risk analysis on the benefits and the risks of upgrading.
Enough about us. We’re boring. How does 7.3 help you, the instructor or student?
First and foremost, it’s fast. I’ve been working with Blackboard at USF for 8 years, and this is about as responsive as I’ve seen myUSF since the 5.5 (2003/04) version. Running on our underpowered test system, older 7.x version we’re very slow, and we’d gotten used to the slowness when testing. On the same test hardware, 7.3 is as responsive and the best commercial web site we’ve seen. Think Amazon.com speed. Really.
Feature-wise, if you’re in one of the 1500 courses that used the Discussion Board this past Spring or Summer, you’ll finally see big improvements. Here’s a couple of ways that Blackboard has fixed the Boards.
Two click to mark all unread messages as read
- Mark posts Read when collected. It’s now takes only two clicks to marks every post in a collection as read.
- Quick Collect unread posts in a forum. One click collects every unread post in a forum.
- Return of the tree view
- Processing graphic let’s you know your discussion board is loading. No more blank pages wondering if your click was received.
Click the number of unread messages to quickly go to a collection of those messages
There’s some other improvements in here as well, but nothing terribly substantial. You can read all about it in the Release Notes [pdf]
Once we know when 7.3 will be installed, we’ll post updates to this blog.