myUSF Blackboard News

The upgrade has been approved by the Courseware Advisory Committee, all technical concerns have been addressed, the documentation has been created, and we are go for upgrade to Blackboard 8.

The upgrade will begin at 12:01 a.m. on Monday December 29th, and will be done by the end of business Tuesday December 30th. During this time, Blackboard will be completely unavailable. Please plan to have any work completed before this time.

All course gradebooks will automatically be updated to the new Grade Center. No actions are required on your part. All other course content will be unchanged by the upgrade.

The documentation is complete, and ready to be distributed. It centers (pun intended) on the new Grade Center, as that is the biggest and most visible change in this upgrade. You can view the online version at this URL
http://wiki.acomp.usf.edu/index.php/Grade_Center

A demonstration instance of Blackboard has been setup and made available to all instructors so that you can experiment with the Grade Center in a copy of your real courses. Instructors who taught in the Fall 2008 should receive an email with instructions on how to get to this demonstration server.

If you have any questions, please send email to help@usf.edu

We talked a while ago about a web page you can use to submit suggestions directly to Blackboard on how they can improve their product. Your ideas are being heard. At last check they had received almost 200 suggestions from USF. Good job.

Additionally, the recently completed Photo Roster tool was the direct result of your suggestions. We never would have built that if you hadn’t told us you wanted it.

Taking a cue from that, we’ve built a simple form right into myUSF so that you can make suggestions directly to us about how we are running Blackboard at USF. If there’s some way you think we could be doing things better, a tool or function that would make your life wonderful, or something that’s currently driving you nuts, please let us know about it via this form.

There are three ways to get to the suggestion form

1. Students

   In every course, in the Course Tools menu, you’ll find a link to the Suggestion form.
   
   

2. Instructors
   In every course Control Panel, in the Tools area, you’ll find a link to the form.
   

   

3. Everyone
   When you first log in, a module with a link to the form is available by default on the Welcome tab.
   
   

Looking forward to all your great ideas.

Blackboard’s assessment engine is a powerful set of tools that allow instructors to create and deploy tests to students. Blackboard provides a number of options that can restrict the ways in which students are able to take a test and reduce the incidence of cheating. The more restrictive the test, the less likely the cheating. However, like airport security, the more secure the test, the less convenient it is for those taking it.

To minimize the chance of test taking problems and give students the best environment for success, we recommend certain considerations when building and deploying tests in Blackboard.

• Do not set Force Completion. This causes a student to not be able to reenter the test if something happens to kick them out. This happens a lot when working on a web browser.
• Display the questions one at a time. This benefits students by automatically saving questions as they progress
• Allow Back Tracking. Otherwise, students are encouraged to click the browser Back button, resulting in an error.
• Create Pools of Questions, and build your tests with random sets from the pools. However, do not also randomize the entire test. Double randomization is a bug in Blackboard.
• Give students a wide window in which to start the test. Discourage situations where the students all start the test at the same time.
• Give students a few extra minutes on the exam to account for unexpected load times.
• Break up large tests into multiple smaller tests. If you want to give a 2 hour test, break it up into four smaller 30 minute tests.
• Break Essay questions into their own tests. Essay questions force students to step away from the browser for extended time, increasing the risk of a browser timeout problem. Minimize the problem by having essays reside in their own test, or consider moving the essay portions to an Assignment.

Please consider these suggestions along with your own test-giving requirements as you create assessments in Blackboard.

MyUSF is currently being considered for an upgrade to Blackboard version 8. This version would bring an awesome new Grade Center to Instructors allowing them more flexible control over how they manage grades.

This upgrade is currently penciled in for December 29th, but that date is under review by a number of parties. This post was created to establish a new category, making it easy to follow news and documentation as it’s published. Please bookmark or subscribe to the Blackboard 8 Upgrade category.

News about the upgrade and documentation about the new Grade Center will be published here in the next couple days.