Grade Center: Two things made massively easier

Two major grade center improvements:

1) you can reorder gradebook columns simply by dragging and dropping.
2) You can change categories en masse.

Both features are available in Full Grade Center > Manage > Column Organization.

Categories

To view which category an item is assigned to, go to:

Grade Center > Manage > Categories

Although the page appears to be disorganized, it is a neat tool that lets you see which category each assignment appears under in the grade book. You can’t edit anything in this area with the exception of category names.

Forum Grade versus Discussion

Discussion grades for courses transferred from BB7 will be categorized as Forum Grades in the gradebook in BB9 like they are in BB7, however, BB9 also has Discussion as a grading category. The theory is that a new forum will that is set up as graded, will by default be put into the discussion category. If this is true, then we may need to consider cleaning up the discussion categories across all courses.

Grade Center views

In the Control Panel > Grade Center, the instructor has three views: Full Grade Center, Assignments, and Tests. How are these column types determined though? By the category applied to each column? To be checked.

Follow up: These column types are determined by categories. If you click Grade Center > Tests, you only see columns assigned to the category "Test." Unfortunately BB7 assigned the category "Exams" by default to new tests, which means we won't be migrating many courses that utilize the category "Tests." Bummer. The "Assignments" view may be more helpful.

This is a training point.

Assignments in transferred courses

Assignments in courses that are transferred over seem to transfer correctly. They are editable by the instructor. For "Number of attempts," the default value is "Once."

Formatting Issues

As ive been creating the template, i was working on the lecture folder and when you transfer over the instructions i noticed that the numbering function seems to be different. It no longer makes everything line up nicely. Im not sure if this is just a bug or just something that needs to be redone but it could cause some issues when long lists are transfered over.

To see what im talking about go to the test template>course content>week 1> lecture and you will see the weirdness :(

Horizontal Rule

Much to my dismay, BB9 did little to fix the horizontal rule feature in the text editor. In BB7 the horizontal rule would only display if you were lucky and never edited that area again. Now in BB9, the horizontal shows when you are actually editing, but does not show up once the text is submitted.

More on the Contacts Tool

This might be done automatically in the course template, but to add a faculty information/contact template to the course menu:

1. Click the "+" button on the course menu.
2. Select "Create Tool Link"
3. For name, put "Faculty Information"
4. Select "Contacts" from the dropdown menu to select this tool.

This will give you the basic template for faculty information that lists everything we require the faculty to provide. To add a biography section, go to the "Faculty Information" content area (once it is created) and select "Create Folder." Name the folder "Faculty Biography" and from there you can enter the faculty members education and work history that pertains to the field that they are teaching.

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?

Assignment Tool interface changes

The Assignment tool now has an extra text field: Submission, then Attach File, then Comments.

[will insert screen shot]

Missing Course Menu

In the PSY and MAT test courses that were brought over, the course menu seems to disappear when you view the syllabus.

Course Entry Point

In Bb9, a new tool called "Course Home" is the default Course Entry Point.

When Course Home is removed from the menu, the default course entry point becomes Announcements.

The setting to see the Course Entry Point is Control Panel > Customization > Style.
Additional wrinkle: Because our Bb7 courses already have a Course Home, this menu item is likely conflicting with the Bb9 native tool called Course Home.

Figure out what to do on the Bb7 side before archiving and on the Bb9 side after the course is transferred.