OK button, get thee gone!

An interface change for the better: remember how in Bb7, every time you submitted something, you had to click OK to confirm the change? NO MORE CLICKING OK! w00t! Confirmation messages now appear near the top of the page, but you no longer have to click OK. This is awesome.

It's the Little Things in Life!

Two new cool things!

Thing 1: Anywhere that there is a text box in blackboard, you can change the vertical height of the box to accomodate larger or smaller amounts of text. This has no impact on how it is veiwed after the text is submitted but its great for viewing large amounts of code without have to continuously scroll.

Thing 2: You can now change the points values of all test questions at once (even retro-actively) using the check all box, and putting in a number for points value.

Content Area Options

When you build a content area, there is an option that allows you to change how the subfolders and items in that area are viewed. You can select from viewing icons only, text only, or the default icons and text. The option is located under "Default Content View" when you edit a content area. You can apply this option to future folders only, or retro-actively to all folders within the content area.

I'm not sure how useful this is, but it's neat anyhow.

Course Content - deleting attached files

Interface change for the better: in Bb7, when you edited a content item to remove an attached file, clicking "Remove" automatically submits the page; in order to make other changes to the content item, you needed to edit the item again. Now in Bb9, when you edit a content item and remove an attached file, you click "mark for removal" instead. You can then make other changes to the content item, and click Submit to save all changes. This is an improvement.

Contacts Tool

The contacts tool is essentially the same as the "Faculty Information" link on the BB7 menu. It has the same template for contact information as the old one. Amy and I think that when courses are brought over from BB7, the content in the "Staff Information" area of the Control Panel tranfers the information to the contact tool, but lists it on the course menu as Faculty Information. Not too much of a chnage except that you can list contact information for multiple faculty members, which could be useful in courses where there are more than one instructor.

Course Content folders vs. Learning Modules

Point for research: differences between Course Content and Learning Modules.

Testing blog notifications

This is a test of email notifications from this blog. (not notifications in Blackboard!) Did you receive an email notifying you of this posting?

BB7 to BB9

I took a quick look at the SCI201 course restored to BB9 from BB7. It looks pretty much like the one Amy brought over previously. The banner is missing and the Course Home defaults to the BB9 Course Home, not the announcements.

COSC Policies, Resources, Plagiarism Pages

We may want to re-thing the format of the COSC Policies, Resources, Plagiarism, and Getting Started pages. While we can make some (not all) of them open in new windows, we were able to make them open inside of the BB7 shell, hence the _header.cfm files. Perhaps Lauren should begin working on standalone webpages for these pages?