We’ve recently upgraded.
Here is a summary of what’s new with online learning:
Advanced Course Menu
Adaptive Release
Review Status
Advanced Assessment Questions
Randomize Multiple Choice Answers
Assessment User Interface Changes
Assessment Question Completion Status
Gradebook Null Option
Advanced Course Menu
Two views of the Course Menu are now available to users; the Quick View (the original menu design) and the Detail View. The Detail View is the full Course Map, letting users expand and collapse the Course Menu, and displays a clickable link to each item in the course.
Adaptive Release
Course content does not always apply to all users in the course. Using Adaptive Release, Instructors can display content to certain users for a limited period of time, or only after users meet (or fail to meet) predetermined requirements. Some content might be applicable to all users in the course, while other content should be audience-specific.
Adaptive Release allows an Instructor to create custom learning paths through course content and activities. Content items, discussions, assessments, assignments, or other activities can be released to Students based on a set of criteria including: date and time, specific users, group membership, grades or attempts on a particular test or assignment, or Review Status of another item in the course.
Instructors create and modify Adaptive Release rules from the new Manage page available on all content items.
Review Status
Outcomes-based tracking is an important feature to most Blackboard clients. Today, Instructors can track item hits on a user-by-user basis, but Students have no automated way of explicitly notifying Instructors when they review an item.
If Review is enabled for a content item, users see a Mark Reviewed icon from the course view. When users have completed their review of the item, they click the Mark Reviewed button. The item then displays a Reviewed icon. The Instructor can view progress from the Performance Dashboard or the User Progress page in the Control Panel.
Instructors enable and disable review from the new Manage page available on all content items.
Advanced Assessment Questions
When creating Assessments, Instructors may choose from ten additional question types, including: Calculated Questions, Numeric Response Questions, File Response Questions, Hot Spot Questions, Multiple Fill-in-the-Blank Questions, Jumbled Sentence Questions, Opinion Scale Questions, Short Response Questions, Either / Or Questions, and Quiz Bowl Questions.
Randomize Multiple Choice Answers
Instructors have the option to randomize the answers in multiple choice questions. The answers are randomized for each assessment attempt, which helps prevent Student cheating.
Assessment User Interface Changes
In Assessments, the following changes appear:
- Partial credit can now be assigned to any question, not just ordering and multiple answer questions.
- Question types are listed in alphabetical order in drop-down lists. For example, when creating a question, the list to select the question type is in alphabetical order.
- The Question Type no longer appears when a user attempts an Assessment or when grading an Assessment.
- Individual feedback for Essay questions can be provided through the View/Grade Assessment page.
Assessment Question Completion Status
Students may skip questions that they may wish to come back to in a question-by-question assessment. This feature allows Students to clearly identify which questions they have actually completed from the ones that they have skipped as they progress through the assessment.
Gradebook Null Option
Current Gradebook calculations for Total and Weighted Total include items that have not been taken or graded. A new option to exclude untaken or ungraded items when calculating the Total and Weighted Total is now available. The Running Total and Running Weighted Total columns display Student performance only on completed items.
Default Availability: The Total and Weighted Total columns in existing courses are not changed by default. Instructors that wish to replace these columns with Running Total and Running Weighted Total must:
- Select Gradebook from the Control Panel of the Course or Organization.
- Select the Total column.
- Select Item Information .
- Select Yes next to Exempt items that have not been graded, and select Submit.
- Repeat for the Weighted Total column.
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