Blackboard is introducing an improvement to the Assignment tool, which I suspect faculty will be quite pleased with. The Assignment tool, as you hopefully are already aware, is the component which allows students to submit files for the instructor to review, grade, and give feedback to the student. Assignments can take almost any type of file, and Inline Assignment Grading can convert, display, and annotate Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDF file formats. In fact, between Office documents and PDFs, that’s 95% of all file types submitted via Assignments on Blackboard’s hosted systems, and I...

Is there anything in your Blackboard course that you really don’t want students to have until after they’ve read something else already in the course? In that case, let me introduce you to my two friends Adaptive Release and Review Status. Review Status is a simple control that can be enabled on any piece of content within one of your content areas, which offers students a button to click to indicate they have reviewed that content. Think of it as a “yes, I did that” button, which could be used by itself to let students check things off as they work through your list of content....

Blackboard’s testing tool has an option to allow multiple test attempts, either unlimited attempts or up to a specified number of attempts. This means that once a student has taken the test a first time, they will  have the opportunity to go back, click the test link again, and try another time. However, a goodly amount of the time, students do not correctly navigate into the test for their second attempt, but instead end up in a frustrating look of viewing the test, saying to Begin the test, and looking at their results from the first attempt. The trick, as much as their is one, is to read the...

I just got off the phone with a faculty member who was planning to have students use the Video Everywhere tool. If you don’t recall, that’s the simple tool embedded in the Content Editor in Blackboard that allows for easy recording of video from a webcam or embedding YouTube videos into the course. The tool is available for student use in tools like the Discussion Board, so this professor was going to have students record their presentations and grant access to their fellow students that way. I’m certain the attempt will go off well, as all the Video Everywhere tool truly does is...

I’ve been seeing an atypically high amount of interest this semester from faculty wanting to start using the Grade Center. That’s excellent, but if you’re just starting out using the Grade Center then a good place to start is with cleaning up some of the default columns that really aren’t of any use. Also, if you are just starting out with posting grades to your Blackboard course, consider meeting with one of the Blackboard support team to discuss how you are going to use grades. We are more than happy to meet with you one-on-one and discuss the specifics of your course; just...