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.
July 30th, 2007 at 8:38 am
I hope that the discussion board will finally be fixed. I relied on it last semester for my survey class and it led to a great deal of rancour when student threads got “lost”!
August 5th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
With Dione…
Wishing and hoping and
thinking and praying,
planning and dreaming
August 19th, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Like Dr. McCook, I hope this works better. FYI, here’s something I left somewhere buried in the blackboard.com domain, because I couldn’t find a place to submit suggestions for BB features:
A forum on desired features would be very wise. I can think of a few to integrate into existing Blackboard structures (not add-ons), but I haven’t found a place to suggest them anywhere in the blackboard.com domain.So, should I hold you all in suspense and make you beg for the suggestions? Nah…Avatars/icons for the Discussion Board. They’re one of the features of the web that reduce social distance, which we know is a factor in student engagement. Greater social distance => greater risk of alienation => lower student engagement. Either the 100×100 LJ-type icon or a larger version (okay, not Second Life avatar!) would be very helpful.Keyboard shortcuts for students with disabilities… and the rest of us. Tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-tab-shift-tab-shift-tab. Oh, wait. Just use the mouse for the 1000th time this session and risk repetitive stress injury. D***.Please, please, please eliminate the "OK" button! Sometimes it means "go back." Sometimes it means "We accept your submission. You don’t have to kneel." Sometimes it means, "We had no clue what to put here as a button, so we just had ‘OK’ like we always do." Please sit down with instructors and students you pay to watch (you do conduct rigorous usability studies, right?), ask them what just happened when clicking ‘OK,’ and then replace the ‘OK’ with a short label for what the users told you what happened.But I’m just one user. Please have a place for people with suggestions, either in this forum or in some place with neon lights.
August 19th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Oh, yikes. The formatting didn’t carry through. The three suggestions:
1. Avatars/icons for discussion board.
2. Keyboard shortcuts for hyperlinks
3. Prohibiting “ok” from any button used anywhere in Blackboard.
August 20th, 2007 at 6:22 am
Blackboard has a suggestion box. See this previous post
I’ve also been pushing for a native photo API for Blackboard. We have their student photos, and those could be included in a variety of places inside Blackboard, Gradebook, Early Warning, Discussion Boards, Blogs/Wikis, all over the place. All we need tis Bb support to make it happens
I have no idea their plans for text hyperlinks
Blackboard is removing the useless receipt pages (OK buttons) from the next version, along with a completely revamped Gradebook. Academic Computing is participating in the 7.4 Beta, if you are interested in helping, let us know.
August 21st, 2007 at 6:03 pm
If I have time, I can participate in the 7.4 Beta. It’s not just the useless OK receipt pages — “OK” is the default “I don’t know what to put here” button for all sorts of pages. I need to catalog them sometime, in my copious free time…
September 3rd, 2007 at 1:26 pm
This DB is still malfunctioning. Posted replies aren’t showing in the “List View” at times but then do show up when you switch over to “Tree View.” It’s not all the time, just sporadically, which makes it even more frustrating. I really wish we could go back to the DB from a year or two ago.
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