MyUni Upgrade

To ensure that the University is using the most contemporary and relevant platform to support Learning and Teaching, we are upgrading MyUni to Blackboard Learn Service Pack 9 (SP9).  This upgrade sees the culmination of work by the IT team in renewing our infrastructure to ensure that servers and associated equipment have the capacity to support the needs of the University moving forward.  You may be interested to note that at points in time during the last teaching period our server utilisation reached 100% of capacity causing system slowness.  We now have much needed excess capacity and look forward to supporting the exciting ways in which the learning platform can be used.

Introducing a better Blackboard Learn (Service Pack 8 & 9)

Service Pack 8 & 9 were born from much consultation with educators and students around the world to bring about a simpler, more enjoyable user experience.  The new release contains a number of new features and enhancements listed below.

Usability Enhancements

The overall theme in Blackboard Learn has been updated to enhance usability. A new clean modern interface has tools which only appear when you hover over items. (layered action based menus) Video - New Blackboard Theme video (2min 50sec)

We know you teach multiple courses and when you are performing a task, you often want to do it for several courses. Task-Based Navigation lets you jump from one course to another, retaining the context of the page, so you can perform the same task across multiple courses, saving you time and frustration.  For instance if you were working in the Grade Centre and changed course via the context switch option, it will take you to the Grade Centre of that course.

Build Content remains the same, but the other action bars have been renamed to Assessments, Tools, and Publisher Content. This resulted from moving adding tool links to the Tools drop-down list and making the naming more generic.

Instead of adding tool links from the Build Content menu of a course, this functionality is now available via the dedicated Tools menu.  You will find many of the day to day tools listed in the drop down with further tools located in the More Tools option.

You will notice that the course menu has substantially changed.  As you hover your mouse over items, you will see you can action changes, move menu items around and change the associated properties.  You will now only see these settings when hovering over the item. The Add Menu Item option list for the Course Menu has a new look and the option names are shorter.

If an instructor links to a HTML file attachment from a course item, access to that HTML file will be granted to all users enrolled in that course. This provides the instructor options to also grant access to other files in the same folder to handle mini websites and packaged content. This ensures student access is constrained by Adaptive Release rules, and these rules and access to the files will be propagated along with the files when the course is copied. This means that packages of files that together constitute a mini website can be constructed within a course and controlled by a single index.html entry point.

Following levels of user confusion around the collapsing course menu behaviour, the course menu has been modified to only retain its collapsed state for the duration of the user session and on a per-course basis. When a user enters a course for the first time in a given login session, the menu will be expanded. If the user collapses the menu, it will stay collapsed for that course only, until either the user expands the menu again, or until the user's session ends.

For newly created courses (as opposed to courses rolled over from the previous year), the Blackboard Learn platform now supports all pedagogical methods. We know that different courses require different structures and designs and the new Quick Setup Guide makes it easy for you to choose an appropriate theme and structure for your course so you spend less time designing and more time on the real work of teaching and learning. More information on Course Structures can be found here; Help Resources

Assessment

In a recent survey more than 68% of students rated electronic submission of assignments as the number one service improvement priority at the University. From 2013, 3 types of online assignment submission will be available. MyUni Assignment (allows for Course Instructors to print assignments or mark online) OR ICC Printed Assignment (printed assignments will be delivered to the school office after the due date) To receive a plagiarism report, Course Instructors can also set up a Turnitin Assignment Lecturers will have the choice of whether they mark on line or on paper. As part of this change, Safe Assign functionality will be turned off.

This most requested new feature will save you time and make it easier to correct problem questions in assessments. With Automated Regrading, instructors can drop, give full credit, change point value, or change which answer is marked correct and the system will re-grade submitted assessments gracefully and provide notification about what has changed. More information on Automated Regrading can be found here; Video Tutorial (2min 58sec) Help Resources

Negative marking allows you to penalise students' incorrect answers with negative points. This feature is most often used in multiple choice tests to discourage guessing. You can enable the negative points option during question creation or when editing a question. Negative points for incorrect answers is available for the following question types Matching Multiple Answer Multiple Choice More information on Negative Marking can be found here; Help Resources

Updated Rubrics now include Percentage Range along with Points Range.  The Percentage Range options allows a single rubric to work with any assignment as the achievement scores are calculated as a percentage of the item being graded. More information on Rubrics can be found here; Help Resources

The Grade History page acts like a log file that records all of the changes that occur to grades within a course, and displays all the data for grade submissions for the course within a set date range. It is possible to manipulate the view and export the information. The Grade History page is accessed from the Reports drop-down in Grade Centre. Select View Grade History to display the page. More information about the Grade History feature can be found here; Help Resources

Collaboration

Blackboard Collaborate Virtual Classroom and Voice Tools brings together the Illuminate and Wimba platforms into one product. It offers tools for the creation of virtual classrooms for teaching purposes, and also allows lecturers to set up spaces where students can work collaborative online. Voice tools give the ability for two way communication in voice and music between the lecturer and the student and is a great tool for languages and music classes but also a great opportunity for other classes. More information about the Collaborate tools can be found here; Collaborate Virtual Classroom Scheduling a Virtual Classroom Collaborate Voice Authoring

Items to Pilot

In addition to these changes and enhancements, there are a number of features that are either new or have not previously been used at The University of Adelaide. As such, we are beginning to build a better understanding of how these tools can be incorporated into our learning environment. We would like identify some courses to test these features so we can begin to develop an understanding of how they can help in your teaching or how they can assist students in their learning.

These items are listed below. If you are interested in being part of a pilot for any of these features, please let Liz Heathcote(liz.heathcote@adelaide.edu.au).