Blackboard UPdates

Blackboard Annotate

Posted 09/01/22

September 8 update for BB Annotate:

Now a side panel will summarize all comments in a list. Selecting a comment will navigate the instructor or student to the location of that comment in the document. This change makes it easier to find all comments and feedback in a student’s submission.

Blackboard's New Unified App for Students and Instructors

Posted 08/16/22

Blackboard's new unified app for instructors and students is now available. You’ll get the same modern and intuitive experience in any device, in a single app, with the features Learners and Instructors use the most.

This link will take you to all the information you need, including downloads: https://help.blackboard.com/Blackboard_Instructor

Students who already have the app on their phone, just need to update their app for this to work
Faculty on the other hand, need to remove their old app and add the new one.

Blackboard Base Navigation Upgrade

Posted 08/16/22

Harper College installed Ultra Base Navigation to Blackboard on 8/13/2022. This update does not change course functionality but provides users with improved mobile device experience, makes the platform more accessible and modernizes the look of the Blackboard welcome page. For the best experience, use the Chrome or Firefox Browsers.
To learn how to navigate the new interface, review:
Faculty Overview on using the New Base Navigation

Honorlock now to Display Central Standard Time

Posted 04/13/22

A small, but impactful “quality of life” adjustment has been made within Honorlock. As of Tuesday, April 12^th, Honorlock has shifted all of its timing mechanisms to reflect Central Standard Time. Prior to the 12^th, Honorlock was defaulting to Eastern Standard Time. What that means for Honorlock users, is that details housed within Honorlock about when a student started and stopped an exam will be reflective of Harper’s time zone.

LockDown Browser and Respondus Monitor: Features to Know

Posted 02/01/22

Did you know LockDown Browser and Respondus Monitor include these features?

Instructor Live Proctoring: This enables instructors to watch students during exams in real-time with Zoom/Teams/Collaborate/etc. while LockDown Browser prevents cheating on the computer itself. More details are here: web.respondus.com/instructor-proctoring/
24/7 Live Chat Support: Students can get immediate assistance (from a real person) when using Respondus Monitor; over a dozen languages are supported.
Additional features can be found here: web.respondus.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/RespondusMonitor_Checklist.pdf

SafeAssign URL Addition Tool

Posted 10/22/21

Blackboard created the Internal Search Service to provide Internet results for SafeAssign Originality Reports and analysis. Occasionally, customers provide feedback that certain sources or websites were missing from the SafeAssign analysis.

To remedy these issues and close any gaps that might be present in the SafeAssign Internet search data, Blackboard has created a tool to request to add domain URLs to the corpus of data that SafeAssign searches against to obtain results from the broader Internet. When a URL is provided, the entire domain for that URL will be searched or “crawled” to obtain the content. Once crawled, the content will be available for searching against for all new submissions going forward.

You can suggest to SafeAssign additional webpages and websites that haven't been flagged or referenced in Originality Reports with the URL Adder tool.

The URL Addition tool is accessible to instructors through: Course Tools > SafeAssign > Suggest URL

We will be unable to accept URLs for sites that utilize a username/password (or other authentication type) to access deeper content.

Gallery View for Instructors Now Available in Blackboard Collaborate Ultra

Posted 04/08/21

Gallery View has just launched for Instructors and Moderators in Blackboard Collaborate Ultra. While it’s available for Instructors and Moderators as of today, it is not yet available for students and participants. This will be coming in the near future, with no set release date. Gallery View allows you to see the most students at one time. With this view, you can see up to 25 attendees on a page - the optimal number of videos you can show on a page and still see enough detail for visual non-verbal feedback. You can see up to 250 videos if you scroll through each page using the arrow at the bottom of the page, while always having the active speaker visible on whichever page you are on. When sharing content, easily switch between the content and seeing all your students’ videos so you can keep an eye on how they respond to it.

Here are some resources to help you learn more about this new feature:

Content Editor- Copy/Paste Images From Other Sources

Posted 03/02/21

In the Original Course View and the Original Experience, within the Content Editor, a user won't be able to use copy and paste functionalities to transfer images from other sources. The user can include images with the Add Content workflow, as it used to be before version 3900.0. We've made this change to address performance problems that arose with certain large or numerous images. We’ll review whether it's possible to reintroduce this capability in the future.

Bb Annotate enhancements

Posted 11/20/20

Starting on Tuesday, November 24th, PDF files will be flattened for the BbAnnotate preview when uploaded for an assignment. On PDFs, text comment annotations made prior to submission will appear as yellow boxes in the document and will not be movable or collapsible. Drawings, pictures, shapes, and other annotations that are not comments will appear normally and also won't be movable after flattening.

When the file is flattened, students can also see their drawable annotations made with iPad or Microsoft Surface pens on PDF preview before the professor grades it. Currently students cannot see annotations until after professor grades it, which can cause confusion about whether the file appears correctly.

This enhancement is an additional security layer in BbAnnotate to prevent forgeable re-submissions of professor annotations. It also resolves an issue where iPad annotations (APStreams) weren’t appearing on annotated PDFs.

This change only affects PDFs submitted in the future. Previously uploaded files (including files with iPad annotations) will render as they have been.

Learn SaaS release 3900.2.0: Update to client Production environments

Posted 11/17/20

Blackboard is applying an updated version of 3900.2.0 (full release number 3900.2.0-rel.11+071cf8e) to client Test/Stage servers during off-hours today Tuesday, November 17, 2020. The Production server will be updated on December 3^rd.

Updates in this version include:

In the Original Course View, response feedback for the Grade Questions feature of the Grade Center was missing in the new content editor, and text entered into the box there wouldn’t save. Blackboard has fixed the issue.

Unannotated Box documents wouldn’t load in Blackboard Annotate. Blackboard has fixed the issue.

Adding Attachments to the "Reply" function in Discussion Boards

Posted 11/17/20

Before the upgrade, one could “attach” multiple documents in the Discussion Boards (reply) button, now they only can attach one. I have confirmed with Blackboard, that since the new text editor was rolled out, a single attachment can be added to the reply, however using the built-in functionality (the + sign), multiple files can be embedded into the reply. They are going the route of embedding versus attaching.

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