You may have noticed some changes in Blackboard since last term. In order to maintain support from Blackboard we periodically have to upgrade. This upgrade had few gains but kept us in a supported state (a good thing). Some of the things we gained – a mobile friendly interface – Bb works better on tablets and phones, were good. Blackboard changed the Record from Webcam mashup to be an imbed from YouTube mashup because the code to link to a YouTube account became impossible to maintain. Another gain for those that use rubrics is the availablility of AAUC Value Rubrics as importable files. If you want to use the AAUC Value Rubrics you can now download a package and upload them to your course. AAUC Value Rubrics are available for download on the Faculty Resources tab in Blackboard.

The not so good…You may have noticed changes in the Grade Center. With the mobile friendly interface the screen width has a fixed maximum and you now have to scroll to see more than a few columns. In addition, it appears that the row height has increased and there is no way to change it. For ease of use, you may want to try using SmartViews which aggregate groups of columns for easier display. More information on SmartViews and how to create them is available on Blackboard’s help site.

Have you tried to change the color of your course menu to match your color scheme? It doesn’t work. This is a known issue that Blackboard will be creating a patch for sometime in the future. Another known issue is in statistics tracking. If you adaptively release content and have statistics tracking enabled, you expect only to see results for the students who are permitted to see the content. The current functionality includes not only those active students who should not see the content, but also students who have dropped the course and whose enrollments are disabled. This issue will also be addressed sometime in a future release of the software.

As much as we try to test for bugs before we decide to upgrade a few bugs get through. We’ve now added additional tests to our process and hopefully won’t see many bugs next upgrade.

If you see any functionality that doesn’t work the way it should, please let us know so we can report it to Blackboard and hopefully get a fix. Send us e-mail at lit@wit.edu.