We will be moving to Blackboard 9.1 Service Pack 8 (from our current 9.1.7) in June, 2012.
The new features in this version include:
- Course-to-Course Navigation: clicking the "Action Link" next to the course title allows you to jump to your current tool in a different course. For example, if you are in one course's Grade Center, you can jump to another course's Grade Center using this tool.
- Automatic Regrading: Instructors can fix test questions by editing the invalid question directly and having all necessary updates be reflected in 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: Negative marking allows instructors to apply negative point values for wrong answers on test questions.
- Course Structures: Instructors can use Course Structures 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. Note: If you choose to implement a Course Structure, Course Structure content and Course Menu links are added to the course’s existing content. Course Structures are available in the Customization area of the Control Panel, under Teaching Style.
- New Reports: New reports include: Student Overview for Single Course, Course Activity Overview, User Activity Overview, and Single User Activity Overview.
New features in the previous upgrade (Service Pack 7) in January, 2012, included:
- Interactive Rubrics: Instructors can create or import rubrics and attach them to one or multiple items, including assignments, discussion boards, blogs, journals, wikis, and certain quiz components. Grades for these types of items can be entered interactively within the rubrics. The rubrics can be visible to students at any time, or only after grading has been completed.
- Timed Assessments (for quizzes): Attempt information for timed assessments includes details on how much time the student spent on the attempt versus how much time was allotted. Instructors can choose to make the timed assessment save and submit automatically when the timer expires, or to allow the assessment to continue beyond the allotted time.
- Needs Grading: This view can now be used with wikis, journals, blogs, and discussion board posts, as well with the previously available assignments and assessments.
- Browser Support: Chrome is now on the list of supported browsers.
- Course Files Move Utility: Course content from courses that were migrated from the old Blackboard in summer 2010 can be added to the "Course Files" area of the same course in our newer version of Blackboard.
