11/28/2011 Planned Upgrade to Blackboard Learn 9.1SP7
We are planning to upgrade to the latest release on December 27, 2011.
Blackboard resolved many issues in Release 9.1, Service Pack 7, including over 100 Bug Squad issues. Highlights from this Service Pack include:
- Announcement emails no longer have multiple footers when sending emails to more than one user.
- Copying Grade Center columns and settings into an existing course no longer creates duplicate system Smart Views.
- Course availability times now default to midnight as expected.
- Email notifications from graded Discussion Forums no longer contain links broken by the erroneous "courseId={unset id}"
Note: as we upgrade to SP7, we implicitly get the enhancements from SP6.
Highlights of Enhancements in SP6:
Grade Center and Assessment Improvements
- Needs Grading
Gradable Blogs, Journals, Wikis, and Discussion Board activity can appear in Needs Grading status in the Grade Center and on the Needs Grading page. When an instructor chooses to make an interactive tool gradable, they will also have the option to choose how many interactions will place the item in needs grading status. A Discussion Board forum, for instance, might be set to only appear in Needs Grading status after a student has made three posts, rather than with each individual post.
- Timed Assessments
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.
- Test Announcements
If announcements are created for a Test, the date and time of the most recent announcement appears on the Test Options page.
- Interactive Rubrics
When creating a rubric, instructors can assign weights to categories, allowing the same rubric to be used across multiple items with different possible points. Rubrics can be imported and exported for use across courses. Existing rubrics in ANGEL and CE8 courses will be converted as part of the course conversion process.
Instructors can associate rubrics when creating gradable content items, including Blogs, Journals, Wikis, Discussion Boards, Assignments, and short-answer, file-response, or essay questions in tests and pools. Rubrics can be associated with multiple items, and all associations can be viewed from the Rubric tool. Multiple rubrics can be associated with an item. The rubrics can be visible to students at any time, or only after grading has been completed.
Instructors can interact with any associated rubric for grading in a grid or list view, and Feedback can be typed for each criteria as well as the entire assessment. Grades calculated using rubrics can be overridden. When a rubric has been used for grading, a report is available to view the results of all content graded with that rubric.
- SCORM Engine Integration
Through a co-development partnership with Rustici Software, a new SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) content player is integrated into Blackboard Learn. This feature will provide users a stable and reliable platform for SCORM content. Along with the new content player is a new report available through the Control Panel to show activity and progress.
Content Management
Adaptive Release Rules Work on Content Collection Items
Adaptive Release now works on Content Collection items that are created within a course and accessed through the Content Collection. Instructors (or those users creating course content) are no longer prompted to give Read access to newly created items. Items that are released at a later date will not show up in a search before they are released.
Important Note: To ensure that adaptive release rules are functioning correctly, courses created prior to Blackboard Learn Service Pack 6 need to be copied, imported, or restored after upgrading. This process updates all links to content within a course and removes specific read permissions from students. Updating the links provides students with access to all files they had previously been granted access to. Removing specific read permissions prevents students from accessing content that they are not allowed see while honoring adaptive release rules.
Desktop Integration
BbDrive must be installed to engage in desktop integration. Once installed, files will automatically open without download. Updates are saved and re-uploaded after a refresh of a Course Content page. Any files that a user has access to will open within their native application. If users have set specific files to open with a specific program, they can open the contextual menu and select open in browser to view the file in a new tab or window. Entire folders can also open right on the desktop to manage files, making deleting multiple files easy for example.
Automatic Student Access to Linked Files
Links to files within courses do not rely on students having read permissions. If a file is linked in a course students enrolled in that course will be able to see it. They will not need explicit read permission.
Improved Browser Support
The following browsers will now be considered compatible
- Internet Explorer 9
- Google Chrome 10 (stable channel)
- Firefox 4 (final release channel)
Note 1: The Firefox Release Channel is the fully tested version by Mozilla and intended to be the most stable. This channel is updated roughly every 6 weeks.
Note 2: The Chrome Stable Channel is the fully tested version by Google and intended to be the most stable as the name implies. This channel is updated roughly every 2-3 weeks for minor releases and 6 weeks for major releases. .
No longer supported:
- Internet Explorer 6, 7
- Firefox 1.x, 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5
- Safari 2.0, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2 and any version on Windows
- Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4 "Tiger"
- Java 5, although it may continue to work
Blackboard also resolved several issues in Release 9.1, Service Pack 6, including:
- Users with the Course Builder role are now able to access unavailable courses.
- In Internet Explorer, content items with date restrictions now display properly on the Course Calendar.
- When accessing an “In Progress” attempt from the contextual menu in the Grade Center, the instructor is no longer intermittently taken to the wrong student’s attempt page.
- Announcement Notification emails that are the result of the “Override User Notification Settings” option are now sent from the user creating the announcement instead of the Blackboard Administrator email account.
- Columns in the Grade Center with “No Category” no longer prevent the instructor from viewing student attempts.
- Instructors are now able to access graded Group Blogs and Journals after unenrolling a student who participated in these tools.
- The session invalidation task now invalidates more than 1,000 records at a time. All invalid sessions are removed when the task is run.
05/24/2011 Planned Upgrade to Blackboard Learn 9.1SP5
Highlights of Bug Fixes in this Release:
There were 120+ fixes in this release. Here are a few issues that had a high client impact which are now fixed in Release 9.1, Service Pack 5:
- Course Files Issues – This Service Pack is a key element of the Course Files Issue Resolution Plan, which is comprised of a series of fixes over three Service Packs (Service Pack 3, Service Pack 4, and Service Pack 5).With Service Pack 5, we are renewing our recommendation to use the Move Course Files Utility. Course Files migration is an integral part of the recommended upgrade path to Blackboard Learn, Release 9.1.Problems related to files moved using the utility after upgrading to Release 9.1 were discovered. This Service Pack provides a more stable Move Course Files Utility that allows you to move all course content from the legacy storage area into the Course Files directories and take full advantage of the Course Files functionality.
- Security Focus – This Service Pack further hardens Blackboard Learn, Release 9.1 from Cross-site Request Forgery and Cross-site Scripting attacks. Cross-site Request Forgery is an attack that attempts to execute actions on behalf of a user authenticated into Blackboard Learn. This release protects key parts of the product, such as the Grade Center. Cross-site Scripting is an attack where malicious scripts are injected into Blackboard Learn. This occurs when specially crafted values are entered into a variable of a web page or stored and displayed by the application. Oftentimes, an attacker would need to convince an authenticated user to access a malicious web page, record, etc., in order to attack the authenticated user. In addition, this release resolves authorization vulnerabilities in the Address Book, Calendar, Grade Center, Portfolio Comments and Display, and Tasks.
- YouTube Mashup not working
o When attempting to add a YouTube video to a Content Area within a course, the course builder was confronted with an error, rendering the video unwatchable. The failure was due to changes in the Google/YouTube API. Blackboard updated our Blackboard Building Block with the additional libraries and resolved the issue.
- Cannot run Course Report (Could not initialize class)
o When instructors attempted to run a Course Report from the Course Control Panel, they were experiencing a “Could not initialize class” error. We were able to correct this issue in Service Pack 5 and successfully generate detailed Course Reports.
- Index out of bounds error access Grade Center attempts
o This‘Index out of Bounds’ error was generated when instructors attempted to access a student’s assignment from the Grade Center that was locked in the “In Progress” state. This issue and allowing ‘Force Submit’ for ‘In Progress’ assignments were fixed and no longer generate errors in Service Pack 5.
- Access Denied error in Grade Center when clicking “save” and “next”
o This issue was only reproducible using Internet Explorer as your browser. When utilizing the ‘Save’ and ‘Next’ button in the Grade Center resulted in an “Access Denied” error message for instructors. This along with several other Grade Center issues were all addressed in our latest release.
- Course Copy to Existing Course does not copy across course files that are not linked.
o When attempting to copy a course into a new or existing course, the course files that were not linked to Content Items (or pages) within the source course were not being copied over. This issue was resolved and all links, content, and items can successfully be copied from one course to another.
As with all Service Packs, Service Pack 5 includes all the issues corrected in previous Service Packs, hotfixes, and all but the most recent patches.
Note: as we upgrade to SP5, we implicitly also get enhancements from SP4.
Highlights of Enhancements in SP4:
- Support for Basic LTI: This is an IMS derivative of the full Learning Tools Interoperability specification that provides a simple integration for instructors to link to external learning tools and applications that also conform to the specification, enabling single sign-on, from within their courses. This capability provides instructors greater choice when it comes to their instructional tools and resources.
- Support for Common Cartridge 1.0: Support for Common Cartridge 1.0, an IMS specification, is now available in the Blackboard Learn platform. Course content packages saved in this standard can be imported into the Blackboard Learn application and course content created in the Blackboard Learn application can be exported as Common Cartridge packages, enabling greater sharing of learning content between learning management systems.
- Module Enhancements in Community Engagement: Blackboard Learn software administrators can now assign categories to modules in the Community Engagement module. This enhancement provides improved searching for the end user and allows administrators to better manage their portal content. In addition the interface where end users select modules to personalize their Blackboard Learn software environment has been updated to create a more intuitive experience.
12/27/2010 We upgraded to the latest Blackboard Service Pack (Learn 9.1 SP3)
Highlights of enhancements in this release:
- Grading improvements in Course Delivery including: assessment creation, rule creation, grading view preferences, and feedback delivery.
- Mobile Learn Building Block installed and activated
New Features:
Adaptive Release
Instructors can now set Adaptive Release rules using a calculated column. Categories for each item in the Grade Center appear in the Select a Grade Center column drop-down list.
Announcements
New Announcements now appear directly below a repositionable bar. Priority Announcements can be moved above the bar so they always appear first in the list. Students do not see the bar.
Early Warning System
Instructors can now set Early Warning System rules using a calculated column. Categories for each item in the Grade Center appear in the Select a Grade Center column drop-down list.
Assessments
Instructors now have the ability to view question numbers while building and editing assessments. Questions can be referenced by number throughout the assessment and can be used to sequence questions in an assessment.
Grade Center
Several features in the Grade Center have been enhanced to improve communication between the instructor and students and make navigation easier.
- Feedback and Comments
To augment the existing ability to download columns from the Grade Center and grade offline, Instructors can now include comments in the download. Comments can be added or edited offline, and are associated with the grade when the column information is uploaded to the Grade Center.
The full features of the Text Editor are now available for Feedback to Users and Grading Notes from the Grade Details page and within the Grade Center grid. The Text Editor can also be used for feedback on Tests, Assignments, Group Assignments, Blogs, Wikis, Journals, and posts to the Discussion Board. Incorporating all the features of the Text Editor allows Instructors to leverage the full range of functions for formatting text and adding external links, attachments, images, Mashups, and multimedia to Feedback and Grading Notes.
Students are able to view the Feedback added using the Text Editor on their My Grades page.
- Needs Grading Page
Instructors can access assignment and test attempts that need grading from a new Needs Grading page accessed in the Grade Center section of the Control Panel. On the Needs Grading page, instructors can view how many attempts are ready for grading and sort and filter the items. Attempts are placed in a queue for easy navigation among items when grading or reviewing. Once an attempt is graded, it no longer appears on the Needs Grading page.
- Smart Views
Smart Views added as Favorites appear as an indented list in the Grade Center section of the Control Panel.
- Column Delete Alert
When groups with graded Blogs, Journals, Wikis, or Discussion Boards are deleted, an alert appears prompting the instructor to save or delete the corresponding Grade Center columns. Managing columns for groups becomes part of the same process as deleting groups.
Text Editor
The symbol font is removed from the Text Editor and a symbol picker has been added.