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News and Updates

Blackboard World Conference July 10-12, 2012 New Orleans, LA

BbWorld is the premier event of the year for you to meet experts, connect with peers, and hear about Blackboard’s product roadmap. BbWorld 2012 will be Blackboard's best conference yet, with more sessions than ever and larger capacity session rooms. In addition to quality session content, BbWorld provides valuable networking opportunities, expert speakers, world-renowned keynote presenters, hands-on training and more. For details and to register click here.

Cengage and Blackboard Integration

Available Now - We are pleased to announce the availability of the Cengage Learning MindLinks™ Building Block for the Blackboard Learn™ 9.1 platform. Instructors and students can now access Cengage Learning digital products, including CourseMate and MindTap™, directly within Blackboard Learn.

LiveText and Blackboard Integration

Available Now - LiveText has partnered with Blackboard to bring us the LiveText Single Sign On Building Block for Blackboard. The building block is designed to eliminate the need for multiple sign on’s for use of both systems. You can add a link to LiveText for students on your course menu and on content areas of your Blackboard courses. Students will be able to link directly into LiveText from Blackboard without having to sign-on each time. LiveText is a leading provider of solutions for assessment, which facilitate data reporting to effectively measure outcomes-based learning goals and objectives. For instructions on how to create LiveText links within your Blackboard courses click here.

McGraw-Hill Connect and Blackboard Integration

Available Now - Educators can easily pull content from McGraw-Hill’s Connect® into their Blackboard courses, which offers media rich content, assessment engines, customization and industry leading adaptive learning tools. For an overview and features click here.

WileyPLUS and Blackboard Integration

Available June 2012 - Wiley is excited to announce that WileyPLUS will be available through Blackboard. Many instructors already use Wiley’s trusted content, including textbooks and digital resources, to teach their course. Now they can seamlessly integrate with WileyPLUS to have everything they need in one central place—right in their Blackboard Learn course. For WileyPLUS and Blackboard demo click here.

10 New Features Coming to Blackboard Summer 2012

In May 2012, we will be upgrading to Blackboard 9.1 Service Pack 8 which will include many new features:

  • Merge Enrollments
    • Multi-section management: Rosters of multiple sections can now be merged to allow instructors teaching multiple sections of the same course to manage the content, course management, and communications tasks for all sections of the course from one central location.
    • Crosslisting: Student enrollment, grading, and content for cross listed courses can now be managed from a single course.
  • Course-to-Course Navigation: Jump from course to course to access the same page/tool. For example, if you are in one course’s Grade Center, you can jump to the next course’s Grade Center easily to complete your grading tasks.
  • Activity Reports:
    • The Student Overview for Single Course report displays an individual student's activity within a course, sorted by date. Data includes the total overall time the student spent in the course as well as detailed information about the student's activity, such as which items and Content Areas the student accessed and the time spent on each.
    • The Course Activity Overview displays overall activity within a single course, sorted by student and date. Data includes the total and average time spent per user and the total amount of activity the user had in the course.
  • Goal, Content Alignment, and Course Performance Reports: All Course Delivery clients can now create and manage Goals to be used in assessing course and student performance. instructors can align individual content items to Goals in order to produce a Course Performance Report. This report generates three views to help institutions understand what course content is aligned to stated learning objectives to identify gaps, determine how a student is performing against learning objective(s) within a course and determine how the collective student membership within a single course is performing against a single goal/learning objective.
  • Automated Regrading: Instructors can now fix problematic questions by simply editing the invalid question directly and having all necessary updates flow automatically to the Grade Center. For any given question, Blackboard now allows instructors to drop, give full credit, change point value, or change the correct answer. After the question has been updated, Blackboard recalculates the score of all submitted assessments that included the updated question, reflects the updates in the Grade Center, and provides notification to both the instructor and optionally to the student for all impacted submissions.
  • Negative marking: Instructors can now apply negative point values for wrong answers on test questions. This allows them to prevent (by penalty) guessing or the selection of egregiously wrong answers.
  • Course Structures: Instructors can now use as a launching pad to create a course, organize content, share knowledge, and build communities. Course Structures contain course areas, optional sample content, pedagogical information, and instructions to help instructors design their course. Course Structure content and Course Menu links are added to the course’s existing content if you elect to add a structure.
  • Quick Setup Guide: When instructors enter a course initially, a Quick Setup Guide screen appears helping instructors set up a new course.

The New Course Request Form
The Course Request Form must be received by the Online Learning Coordinator for each course in which you will use Blackboard at least 10 days prior to the start the semester in which the course will be taught.  The request form much be completed each time you wish to create a new online course or wish to reuse an existing one. Requests submitted after the deadline will be processed on a case-by-case basis and may result in a delay of course creation and population.  Go to Information for Instructors or click here for more information.

In an effort to improve the efficiency and quality of Blackboard courses at Winthrop, the following changes are taking effect:

  • Faculty wishing to use/create a Blackboard course must complete the online Course Request Form.
  • All students enrolled in Blackboard courses must activate and regularly check their winthrop.edu e-mail account. No exceptions will be made.
  • All faculty members interested in designing a course must have an active winthrop.edu account.
  • All student and instructor Blackboard ID's match the user's winthrop.edu  e-mail alias.
  • All instructors wishing to design a new course must attend a faculty training session.
  • Any student enrolled in a Blackboard course who did not have a working winthrop.edu e-mail account prior to the week of the first day of classes must go to 15 Tillman or to http://www.winthrop.edu/acc/default.asp and fill out an e-mail account creation request form in order to receive a valid login ID and password. Students with winthrop.edu e-mail accounts are automatically added prior to the beginning of the semester. All Winthrop University students are required to have working winthrop.edu e-mail accounts, and it is the student's sole responsibility to be aware of any course related information sent through official Winthrop e-mail.

Beware of "Internet Optimizer"
 If you are unable to log in to Blackboard because an Adware program keeps launching called Internet Optimizer, you need remove it immediately. Symantec has developed a removal tool to eliminate this, click here to download it. You should also download and run an anti-Spyware program such as Spybot Search & Destroy, click here to download it.

 

Blackboard Instructor's Manual 
For faculty new to Blackboard, there are now detailed instructions now available on our website.The Blackboard online manual is avaiable online.
Go to Information for Instructors or click here.


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Blackboard Contact Information
Kimarie Whetstone, Online Learning Coordinator
Instructional Technology Center | 803.323.2551 | whetstonek@winthrop.edu
Last updated: 05/03/12