Blackboard Tools

Assessments

Designers and Lecturers can add their own custom quiz instructions to the top of an assessment, providing students with unique and tailored directions.
If questions are delivered one at a time, the lecturer can choose to display the instructions for the first question only or for all subsequent questions.
In addition students taking a self test can now receive immediate feedback after answering a question without having to first complete the entire self test.

The View reports option has been expanded to provide a full set of statistics for surveys.
The reports include: overall statistics report (includes grade distribution summary); statistics for each answer are calculated; all student responses to a paragraph question; comparison statistics report (compare students by summary statistics or by question); a new column that displays median score for each question.
The Demo student and un-enrolled students are not included in assessment reporting statistics.

Lecturers can now create links to content such as assessments, assignments directly inside the calendar. Each calendar entry may contain only one content link.
Navigation between views of calendar is now easier with clearly marked tabs for day, week or monthly view.

Discussion now provides Lecturers more options and flexibility for efficiently managing student discussions.
Lecturers can now change many of the discussion settings midstream. Eg - an anonymous discussion can be changed to be non-anonymous from that point on.
Lecturers can better moderate a discussion topic to restrict students from posting or replying to the specific topic.
Peer review is a new feature for Discussions and Class Blogs which allows students to rate each other's posts based on criteria set by the lecturer.

There are two new types of discussion formats and a new feature:

Blogs
Lecturers now have the ability to create Class Blogs giving students new ways of expressing themselves and collaborating with peers online.
Journals
Provide a private space where students can reflect on their experiences, chronicle their learning, or record their reactions to a class lecture or discussion.

The Goals tool allows designers to create, organise and present the learning goals of the course to their students.
Lecturers can associates the goals with materials from the course so that students can click any given goal to see a list of all the course content and activities that will help the students attain that goal.

Lecturers can specify multiple grading criteria for a learning activity and define performance levels for each element of the criteria.
Lecturers and designers can create one or more grading forms in a course and associate the forms with assignments, discussions, grade book columns.

There are 2 new options for releasing grades:

Release score after the availability period has ended;
Release score after the availability period has ended and all of the questions have been graded.

Lecturers are able to release statistics for numeric or calculated columns. For example, a Lecturer may wish to release the average score for an assignment to students.
If you unenrol a Student, their grade information remains in the Grade Book.
You can show/hide un-enrolled student grade information by using the Show/Hide Unenrolled Member Data option.
Administrators (Unit, School/Department and Faculty) can also set the default behaviour for your section.
The demo Student cannot be removed from the Grade Book.
New sections can be created without the Mid-term and Final grade columns. These sections are not copied from another section, nor do they have a template applied. For more information contact your Faculty Administrator or MUSO Support.

The function of rolling over a section for a new semester has been simplified by being able to copy content from one section to another and more easily assign templates to sections.
These functions can only be performed by an administrator (i.e. Unit Administrator, School/Department Administrator or Faculty Administrator).

Lecturers and designers can streamline semester-to-semester transition by automatically updating all dates for the items in their newly copied section, by simultaneously setting the section forward by a specified number of days.

Learning Modules are used for presenting content in a pre-defined sequence that can now be included on the course menu, making them accessible to students from anywhere in the course.
The first page of a learning module can display the table of contents for that module.
Designers have a choice of displaying elements within the module as numbered items or simply as a list.
Designers can now quickly update all titles of the table of contents in a learning module through a single screen where they can edit efficiently.
Items in the contents can be expanded or collapsed for easier navigation

Mail forwarding to an external mail account has been turned on.
You can set the email address (default is your Monash mail account) and forwarding behaviour (on/off) in the My Settings tool (see below).

Provides staff and students a central place to set their personal preferences that determine the behaviour of tools and other elements in Blackboard.
Preferences can be set for Calendar; Discussions; Font size and type; Mail; Paging; and others.

Information available in the My Profile tab has been set as default for everyone and is not editable.

Faculty administrators are able to re-set sections. When a section is reset, its content is deleted and Students and Observers are automatically unenrolled.

Lecturers can now organise web links into categories for improved organisation and presentation to students.
Lecturers can allow students to contribute web links to a specific category, promoting greater student engagement and active learning.
Web Links are now easier to manage.
Whenever a web link is added to a course, it is automatically added to a comprehensive Web Links page, giving lecturers and students a central place to easily access and review all web links used within a course.

Allows users to open any folder in the File Manager as a Web Folder.
Web Folders leverage WebDAV technology, which lets users easily drag and drop files between their desktops and Blackboard.
Users can open Web Folders within the Blackboard interface, and minimal set-up is required.

Faculty, School/Department and Unit Administrators can now enrol multiple users from within Blackboard as the same role and into the same learning context.
Enrolment searches can now be saved. Naming convention for saved searches – Faculty-search title.

Create groups
Faculty Administrators are now able to create groups and manage administration enrolments for all levels in Blackboard manager.