"Course Home" question solved (sort of)

I've figured out why students see errors when they enter a course and see the Course Home page, even when instructors don't have a problem seeing the Course Home page. This discovery will affect both how we clean up Bb7 masters before migration, and how restored courses will need to be cleaned up after the migration.

ISSUE:
This Course Home page is built on the Module tool, a tool that is new in Bb9. Right now at the system (admin) level this tool is (or should be) enabled in all courses. It IS enabled in courses created fresh within Bb9. Despite this system-level setting, the Module tool becomes unavailable in a course when a course that originated in Bb7 is either restored or imported into Bb9. This setting loss causes two issues: 1) the instructor can see the Course Home page and thinks it's working fine, but students see the error; and 2) if the course menu doesn't contain a Course Home item by default, there's no way to add one. Nice!

[Side note: it's not just the Module tool that reverts to unavailable within the course despite the system level setting; this happens with any new tool or content type that didn't have a precursor in Bb7, including blogs, wikis, journals, image, video, YouTube Video, etc.]

RESOLUTION:
There is a fix but it's very manual and not very pretty:

1. Enter the affected course in Bb9.
2. In the Control Panel, click Customization > Tool Availability.
3. Click to select the checkbox for the Module tool, and click Submit to save.
4. In the course menu, click the Plus button, then click Create New Module Page.
5. Name the new page Course Home.
6. Be sure to select Available to Users.
7. Click Submit to add the page.
8. Use the drag handle to move the Course Home menu link to the top of the menu.
9. Now click the Course Home menu link.
10. On the Course Home page, click the Edit button (the down arrow) and select Add Course Banner.
11. Add the course banner and click Submit to save.
12. On the Course Home page, click the Add Course Module button.
    NOTE: when you create a Course Home page this way, by default users (students) cannot customize their personal view of the Course Home page. This is good - I argue we don't want students to customize this page.
13. Click the check boxes for the modules you want to add to the page. We can discuss, but I propose the Course Home page should contain the following modules:
    - Alerts
    - My Announcements
    - Needs Attention
    - What's New
14. To add the selected modules to the Course Home page, click Submit to save.

PHEW. That's a lot of steps. The good news is that we understand the problem and know one way to fix it. (Paying a contractor anyone?!?)

My research has found this building block that may allow us to re-enable the Module Tool and set the Course Home page in bulk. I've asked our LMS admin if he can install it. If not, this will be an important cleanup task on the far side of the master migration.

Automation of Groups

BB9 has significantly improved the ease of creating groups. The tool allows you to create a set of groups all at once. You can choose to have the members randomly placed, manually placed of self-placed into the groups. You can either set the total number of groups or the number of students you would like in each group, and BB9 does the rest for you! From this page, you can also select the tools available to the group.

Grade Schema?

We need to figure out:

1. Why there are multiple grade schema in course grade centers besides the default grade schema set by at the system admin level;
2. how to delete the unnecessary/duplicate grade schemas; and
3. whether there's a way to prevent instructors from building and applying their own schema at the course level. (On this point I did investigate privileges for the instructor role, but didn't find privilege rules around the Grade Center.)
   

Statistics of Grade Center columns

Good news: It's now possible to turn off statistics (average and median) in grade center columns. Instructors have often asked for this ability, citing student confusion and questions.

Bad news: Stats are still visible to students by default, and the setting is specific to each gradebook column. To hide stats, the instructor must change the setting on each individual gradebook column.

To hide stats, click the double-arrow button for any gradebook column that contains scores (e.g. not a calculation column) and select Edit Column Information. In the Options section, change "Show Statistics" from Yes to No. Then click Submit to save the change.

Viewing Student Grades

One way to view student grades in list form is to create a report.

To do this: go to Grade Center>Reports>Create Report.

Once to the report page, you have several options. You can create a report for one student, a group of students or the whole class. You can also choose different data to display in the report such as what to name the report, which users to include in the report, what user information (such as first and last name, course id, email, etc) to display, a description of the assignment and statistics for that assignment such as mean and median scores. Your report can also be specific to certain categories such as assignments, tests and quizzes, discussions and surveys.

Course IDs next to Course Titles

Whooooeeeee! I set up the Courses list on the Bb9 home page (My School tab) so that instructors (and students) see course IDs as well as course titles. YAHOO! This is a big "little" thing to help instructors tell the difference between their million course shells.

Practice lab Thurs 7/15

Hi folks,
I'll meet you at the Alumni training room a few minutes before 12:30 today. Things we'll look at today:

• One more focused look at the Grade Center
• Differences in Course Files and Content Collection features now that the system accurately reflects our license (e.g. no more Content System)
• Notifications / Course Home thing

Thanks. --Amy

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.