Products & Services

Working with 1000 instructors, students and administrators to develop our last major release in November seemed hard to top, but I was humbled and proud to hear that more than 2000 have guided us in the development process since then as we hit another milestone with today’s release of a simply better Blackboard Learn.

Through our wide array of client programs, we empowered you to take ideas and work hand-in-hand with us through the development process, from the initial creation of the use case, to design and the field trials. And because we’ve invested heavily in these programs, I hope that when you see product videos, screenshots and ultimately get your hands on these features, you’ll say, “That’s exactly how I expected it to work.” Our goal is to let you focus on core teaching and learning tasks and not the technology support around those activities.

One of the first things that stands out to someone new to Blackboard Learn is the overall grading workflow. Starting with the Needs Grading View, you have an instant, streamlined view into what requires your attention.

This new release extends our inline (i.e. onscreen in the browser) grading capabilities from blogs, discussions, wikis and journals to assignments. Imagine the traditional workflow for scoring these. You would need to download the file, save it to your desktop, make edits, save again and then re-upload. Now you can make all those annotations (text edits, highlights, comments, strikethroughs) right on the screen. And it doesn’t stop there! Once you grade one student’s work, in just one click you can easily navigate to the next assignment – without having to go back to the GradeCenter to enter grades.

Assignments are one way to measure student learning, and of course, tests are another. You outlined certain scenarios that required us to change design, deployment and feedback options for tests, and today’s release delivers on those. You now have the ability to set different test availability rules for different users, or groups of users – for example, for students with disabilities who might need more time to complete a test. And on the feedback side, there is more granular control for what a student sees. So after submitting the online exam, a test-taker can immediately see the final grade but not the answers to prevent cheating.

I’m a numbers guy, so I would be remiss if I didn’t use this opening to mention my favorite feature that came out Blackboard Learn last fall – Test Item Analysis. I’m not going to get into the algorithms and backend calculations that were created by people far smarter than me, but in a nutshell, this feature measures the effectiveness of your assessments. Perhaps a question was worded poorly, or a student can justify an alternate answer, or maybe it was just a simple mistake and the wrong answer was put into the system. This feature helps you identify – and then automatically correct  – those issues.

Fear not, you don’t need to manually go in and regrade each affected test. Within this workflow itself, you can edit the offending test question and then hit “update and regrade.” Whether it’s five tests or 500, you just fixed it with one push of a button!

Now that you’ve scored assignments and tests, you need to analyze student performance in your courses. One option is to look at grades and the information in the Course Activity Reports, which track which students access your online materials and for how long.

Suppose we did that for you? In, let’s say a dashboard that measures student engagement and performance? That’s exactly what we built, and we call it the Retention Center. This automatically identifies students could be at-risk, and allows you to take action before it’s too late. Whether that’s scheduling office hours, providing more personalized instruction or assigning additional content, that’s up to you. Now you have the tool to help you do just that.

If conducting some virtual sessions or scheduling office hours is part of the plan for your at-risk students, you can do that on our revamped, modern calendar. It addresses one of, if not the most requested enhancement to Blackboard Learn. Those of you who are J’s on the Myers-Briggs indicator like me will love the ability to color code courses and activities on the calendar. And if you need to modify the due date, you can simply drag and drop to the new spot on the calendar –the date associated with the assignment in Blackboard will automatically update!

That’s just a quick peek into what we’ve done in this release for you. I could go on about the rebuilt Discussions and ways that we’ve incorporated assistive technology into the system, but I’ll let you see those in action on our YouTube Channel

And our support for you, the educators, doesn’t stop upon the release of the features. We’ve made a significant investment in empowering faculty members, as is evidenced by a new Faculty Resources page. There, you can find the most up-to-date information including feature videos, training programs, our MOOC catalogue, and on-demand tutorials.

We recognize that the time that we make new functionality available to you doesn’t always sync up with when your institution plans to adopt those features. In order to leverage these innovations and enhancements, I encourage you to test drive the latest version of Blackboard Learn yourself for free with a Guided Trial. Whether you want to see how we’ve addressed your concerns or if you just want to get a head start on rolling out these new tools to your students, the Guided Trial can be tremendous asset for you.

Do you have two minutes and want to see these in action before jumping in? Take a look at the video below, and you’ll see why Blackboard Learn is simply better for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxdJ3ar12bE&feature=share&list=PLontYaReEU1uivbr7MFnCcdSgLgELAkRP

Though many (hopefully most) students take their education seriously, there will always be a few who don’t keep their eyes on their own work. And in this day and age, we’re seeing new ways of cheating the system emerge. Jeffrey R. Young with The Chronicle of Higher Education cites one example where students used a shared Google Doc that they could view and edit while taking the test.

Educators should not have to divert time from quality instruction to worry about students who try to buck the system, which is why we want to help you beat the cheat. How?

Through our long-standing partnership with Respondus, a leading provider of secure testing solutions. Respondus has just launched a new product, Respondus Monitor, a companion tool to Respondus Lockdown Browser. Respondus Monitor uses webcam and video recording technology to ensure students don’t use inappropriate resources (like smartphones or second computers) during online, non-proctored exams.  And, all of this is available through a seamless integration with Blackboard Learn.

The overall shift to online and hybrid course offerings has opened up so many educational opportunities to so many who were previously unable to participate, but it also gives cheaters new opportunities to expose holes in online testing and assessment solutions. Beating cheating is no less important than it ever was. Only now it’s less difficult.

Want to learn more? Join us for a webinar Wednesday, April 3^rd at 3pm (EST) to get a peek at this new, innovative product.

The product management and user experience teams at Blackboard make it our primary goal to listen, constantly seeking out how we can be of service.

We’ve heard about the struggle for some educators to keep up with their active learners; we’ve also seen the scrutiny that is applied when institutions are faced with retention goals; we know the value that our ANGEL instructors are enjoying from the WhoDunIt report. All this and more led us to an investment in giving educators a tool to that made spotting the risks simple, so they can spend their time working with students to help them improve.

Over 330 customers helped us achieve the final design of the Retention Center. Members of the Blackboard Idea Exchange responded to surveys about how they assess risk and even what to name this feature. Instructional Designers talked with us about the conversations they have with the faculty members on their campuses as they help them deal with student retention challenges. Instructors talked with us about their needs, and spent time usability testing the details of the design itself.

In our final testing, the words most commonly selected by instructors to describe the feature were: organized, customizable, desirable, relevant, motivating, and empowering. Those last two really made an impact on us; we knew this feature was going to help educators. After one professor tested the feature she commented, “It motivates me to think about how I can help the students improve and succeed. I want to use it.”

Are you an educator? Get motivated. Be empowered. Check out the new Retention Center in Blackboard Learn. We know you’ll love it.

Did you help us design the Retention Center? Give us a shout out on Twitter! Want to help us in the future? Make sure you’re signed up for the BIE.

The most satisfying part of my job is seeing progress in attacking “big problems” in education. It’s when we take on these bigger challenges that we arrive at breakthrough thinking and innovation that matters. Today we’ve shipped a new feature for our Learn platform that I think fits that bill—a new feature called “Retention Center.”

The big problem: inability to track student performance and take action before it’s too late. There’s been much ink spilled in the industry about big data and analytics, and we’ve developed an entire product line focused on mining data to create institution-wide perspective. But academic research has shown that one doesn’t need “big data” solutions to yield meaningful insight at the grass roots, course level. There’s insight in patterns of student behavior, and in relative performance through course progression that can be very valuable to both instructors and the institution.

There’s a clear tie between the institutional level goal of student retention and the astute instructor’s early awareness of behaviors or results that suggest underperformance. Our new Retention Center is offered to help gather every piece of information about this area we can, using the power of technology to create insight, perspective and opportunities for instructors to take immediate action. Our hope is that it can help bring insight to instructors so they can intervene earlier than they might otherwise be able to, and to help them prioritize their increasingly limited time.

What does it do?

The Retention Center gives critical insight on learning and activity gaps to instructors, within the LMS, that helps them quickly diagnose students that are falling behind. Pre-configured and automatic so they don’t have to hunt for it. No set-up: it automatically calls out students that are at risk while instructors still have time and space to do something about it. With the feature instructors can see:

• Who’s logging in: this is a simple but powerful predictor of student success. Instructors see how long it’s been since students have logged in to the course and how many have been away for five days or more. And not by fishing through student profiles or reports but in an automatic view complete with red flags where they’re needed.
• Whether they’re engaged: which students have had low levels of course activity, at 20 percent or below the average in the last week.
• Whose grades are suffering: which students are currently trending at 25 percent or more below the course average so they can target extra help to where it’s most needed – even when it isn’t asked for.
• Who has missed deadlines: instructors might know this anecdotally or on a case-by-case basis, but now they can get a real-time view of all students that have missed one or more deadline.

Student retention is a big problem, and it’s being addressed at lots of levels with a variety of approaches. But few of them give instructors as much actionable data that can be used immediately. Few of them offer instructors so much specific insight on areas to engage without requiring heaps of time that they don’t have. That’s why we built this feature: to give instructors a leg up in tackling a tough education challenge right in their course.

If you’re interested, take a quick peek at our new feature in this video.

Cheers,

Ray

My name is Chris Borales, I’m the on the Blackboard Learn product marketing team and I wanted to talk a little bit about some great strides that Blackboard has made in the area of accessibility.

Blackboard strives to deliver a quality experience for all of its users, regardless of ability. In fact, in Service Pack 11, we continued to build on the considerable progress we’ve made in the area of accessibility by becoming the first LMS in the world to achieve third-party verification of conformance with the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0 Priority AA standards issued by Deque Systems.

What does that mean exactly for users with disabilities? In service pack 11 Blackboard has:

• Increased focus on color contrast throughout the application ensuring that contrast ratios meet or exceed the 4:5:1 contrast ratio requirements of WCAG 2.0 Priority AA.
• Updated keyboard navigation within contextual menus and list action menus to ensure they follow commonly understood keyboard patterns.
• Controlled focus when completing tasks within the screen reader view of the Grade Center, ensuring the user is returned to the proper cell in the main Grade Center table.
• Made improvements to the screen reader interaction within the ‘fill in multiple blanks’ question when building and taking a test.

These enhancements greatly improve the experience navigating within Blackboard Learn and completing key teaching and learning tasks for users with disabilities. See more about what else we are doing to make Blackboard Learn more accessible here.

“Making accessible software is about so much more than meeting the standards. We continue to drive toward the usable and enjoyable experience for everyone,” notes Vice President of User Experience Stephanie Weeks.

With Blackboard Learn 9.1 we continue to provide all users a quality experience, and you can expect some great things to come as we move forward in 2013.