Blackboard

Many UA Little Rock faculty use Blackboard for face-to-face and online courses. This section will walk you through some of the essential Blackboard content and assessment types.

Lectures

Narrate your PowerPoint slides or record a screencast as a way to deliver course content. You may use a computer with a microphone or a tablet to create this type of lecture. Your recording can then be uploaded to Blackboard for student viewing. External materials such as articles, blogs, videos, or websites may also be posted on Blackboard.

Assignments

Regular Assignments are the best assessment option for student writing. To create an Assignment, click Assessments > Assignment in any Blackboard content area. You can customize the assignment's presentation from the setup options. Once the link is created, students will go to it to submit their work. You can then access their submitted work from the Grade Center. See below for more information about the in-line grading tool.

Helpful Resources:

• Create and Edit Blackboard Assignments

• Use SafeAssign in Blackboard Assignments

Journals

Blackboard Journals are appropriate for shorter writing activities and classwork. If you aren't concerned with document format or in-line grading, journals can be much quicker to read and grade than traditional assignments. The Journal assessment type allows for multiple separate journal assignments. It's often clearer for students if you create a separate journal assignment for each assigned activity. Journals can be created from any content area by click Assessments > Journals.

Class Discussions

For a discussion-based class, create an online discussion board on Blackboard. In any content area, click

Helpful Resources:

• Create Blackboard Discussions

• Strategies for Creating Online Discussion Prompts

Grading OWI Assignments

The in-line commenting and grading feature in the current version of Blackboard is an essential tool for online teachers. Instead of downloading student essays, marking them up in Word, and re uploading them to Blackboard, instructors can now leave comments directly on student papers inside of Blackboard, post comments, and enter grades, all from one screen. You can find Blackboard's tutorial video for online grading below. Here are some things we have learned about the in-line grading feature and how well it works in writing courses:

• Be conscious of the time-out feature. The inline editor times out after 60 minutes, so if you are in the middle of marking up a paper and you get up to do something else, make sure you click "Save Draft" and exit the in-line editor. You can come back to it later and pick up where you left off. If you leave the editor up and come back to it after an hour, any markup you attempt to add will not "stick." This can also become and issue if you have a sketchy internet connection. Your best bet: Click "Save as draft" often just to be safe.

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• If you want to leave styled comments, or use video/audio comments, click the "A" underneath "Feedback to Learner." You'll have the full Blackboard content editor in a popup window.

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• Use "Grading Notes" to leave notes to yourself about the paper. These aren't visible to the student, and can be really useful if you're going to conference with a student later.

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• The grade center column for the assignment must be visible to students in order for them to see your feedback. If you want to release all your feedback at once, hide the column from student view, complete your feedback, then unhide the column.

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• Students can access your feedback from two places:

  1. Go back to the original assignment link where the essay was submitted. Once the feedback is released, the comments and grade will show up. Until then, the paper the student actually submitted will show up (so they can always check to make sure that their submission "went through" correctly.

  2. Go to My Grades and click on the actual graded item (the drawback to this method is that they can see the grade here without actually reading the comments.

• You must leave some kind of grade in order for feedback to be visible to students. This can be tricky when you're leaving feedback on drafts. The best rule of thumb here is to be consistent. If points for drafts aren't a part of your grading scheme, make sure that students know that if they see "100/100" as the grade for their draft, it just means that they submitted it and you commented on it, not that they actually received an A+.

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• "Point Comments" work most consistently. Some of the other markup tools are more frustrating.

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• The in-line editor accepts most common file types (PDF, Doc, Docx, RTF), but not .pages files. See the section on file type naming for more tips about this.