This Week in Instructional Design - Archives
Bb 7.2, Coming Soon - 5/24/07
Highline will be rolling out a significant upgrade to
Blackboard over the summer. Right now the schedule is:
- May - Available to faculty for testing/building courses
- Summer Quarter - available to faculty, not available to
students. Courses will be taught on the current version.
- Fall Quarter - New version used for all courses.
Stay tuned for workshops and more details on the schedule and
on the changes and new features in this version.
Spring Quarter first week checklist - 3/26/07
- Make your Blackboard Courses available (how-to...)
- Update your syllabi and office hours on your web site
- Change your voice mail back from your spring break
message
Welcome Back Rod! - 3/26/07
Rod Fowers continues as Faculty-in-Residence. He's available
for one-on-one help, Blackboard Orientations, and more. He'll be
convening a Faculty Learning Community to talk about assessment
in online courses. Contact him at ext. 3401 or
rfowers@highline.edu.
Did you know? - 12/1/06
At Wikipedia, there is a "Cite this Article" link that provides
bibliographic details and readymade citations in APA, MLA, Chicago and
other styles. http://en.wikipedia.org
Dictionary.com is following suit - it provides a "Cite this Source"
link that opens in a new window. Have a look!
http://www.dictionary.com
Blackboard Upgrade Postponed - 11/3/06
During the opening faculty meeting, I announced that there were some
significant updates coming to Blackboard on campus, with a release
scheduled for Winter Quarter. After careful consideration, we have
decided to put that off until (probably) Spring Quarter.
There are two key reasons for the delay:
- Some colleges that upgraded over the summer have reported
significant problems, both because of technical issues and the
changes that were made to the discussion board. We'd like more time
for the problems to get fixed, and more time for you to get familiar
with the new discussion tool.
- We are using the opportunity created by the upgrade to move our
Blackboard server to a more robust infrastructure. Some of the parts
we need are late coming to campus, and we'd be happier with more
time to test this system.
The current schedule for the upgrade is now as follows:
- Blackboard 7.1 available to faculty mid-winter quarter
- 7.1 in production (used with students) for Spring Quarter
classes.
------------------
PS: If you're wondering why we might be upgrading, or what it means
for you, read on.
Things that we've already done:
- Enterprise upgrade, which removes the limit we had on number of
students, and allows us to do some administrative things that will
reduce the number of passwords you have to change, better manage
student enrollments, and the like.
- Adaptive release, a very cool feature which allows you to
release content to students based on their performance on other
parts of your class. For example, students get to post in a
discussion board only after correctly answering the questions in a
reading quiz.
- More variety in question types in quizzes and surveys
Things that are coming, now scheduled for Spring:
- Revised discussion board, with "Thread Grading." That means you
can assign a grade to a student's discussion post *while reading the
post*. There are new ways to sort the threads in the discussion
board too, so you can more easily review all the contributions made
by a student, for instance.
- Advanced text editor for Mac and Firefox users, and more
functionality for the Internet Explorer/PC crowd.
- Ability to do double-byte languages, which is computer-ese for
Asian languages and Arabic.
Last updated:
September 14, 2007
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