Teaching & Learning IT
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Blackboard 9.1 Service Pack 8 - What's New?
New Features
Needs Grading Tool Enhancement:
Gradable Blogs, Journals, Wikis, and Discussion Board activity will now appear in Needs Grading status in the Grade Centre and on the Needs Grading page.
Timed Assessments Enhancement:
Instructors can now choose to make the timed assessment auto-submit, or to allow the assessment to continue beyond the allotted time. Students are provided with visual cues to track their progress when taking and submitting timed assessments set to auto-submit. Attempt information for timed assessments includes details on how much time the student spent on the attempt versus how much time was allotted.
SCORM Engine Integration:
Through a co-development partnership with Rustici Software, a new SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) content player is integrated into the Blackboard Learn platform. Along with the new content player, a new report is available through the course Control Panel to show student activity and progress within the SCORM package.
New Supported Browsers:
Blackboard 9.1 now supports Internet Explorer 9, and all newer stable versions of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
Course-to-Course Navigation:
Course-to-Course Navigation allows students and instructors to jump from course to course while retaining the context of the page or task from the original page of any recently accessed course.
Activity Reports:
Activity Reports provide reporting on how users are utilizing their Blackboard Learn courses and course materials. The following reports are available: Course Activity Overview; Student Overview for a Single Course.
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 Centre. Instructors can drop, give full credit, change point value, or change which answer is marked correct. After the question has been updated, Blackboard Learn recalculates the score of all submitted assessments that included the updated question, reflects the updates in the Grade Centre, and provides notification to both the Instructor and optionally to the Student for all impacted submissions.
Negative Marking:
Negative Marking allows Instructors to apply negative point values for incorrect answers on assessment questions.
Improvements to handling Mini-Websites and File Packages:
When an instructor links to an HTML file attachment from a course item, access to that HTML file will be granted to all users enrolled in that course. Instructors can also grant access to other files in the same folder or selected files in the Content Collection to handle mini-websites and packaged content.