Blackboard news

Latest Blackboard news I gleaned from attending the recent West Midlands Blackboard users group.

•    Confidence was high after the recent acquisition by venture capitalists – and was reported to “be business as usual”
•    The new rubrics tool (available in Service Pack 6) can be deployed at assessment creation stage – this ensures constructive alignment is built into the assessment process. Multiple rubrics can be utilised on a single assessment. Students will be able to view easily all the feedback and feed forward comments.  This has the potential to provide very detailed feedback – and has appears to be more flexible than GradeMark.  GradeMark only offers 10 single rubric criteria, whereas the Bb version has up to 100. You are also able to export rubrics and therefore share them amongst courses.
•    There is a new SCORM player – that allows tighter integration (of Adobe Presenter) with the Grade Centre.
•    We saw a demonstration of the flexibility offered by the overarching Community feature. Amongst many portal type features this allows local administration and finite control of blocks using the Community addition.   For example one School could purchase a “block” and it could be controlled to serve only the students of that area. This feature is not available at Aston.

•    Kaltura + Sharestream are now official Bb partners. Both offer viable options for a video streaming solution via BB?

•    BB Collaborate (replacing Elluminate & Wimba) is out now:
http://www.blackboard.com/Platforms/Collaborate/Products/Blackboard-Collaborate/whats-new.aspx?cmpid=CollabB_WhatsNew_071011

Blackboard blocks/extensions;

•    Durham have developed a Twitter and sign up block
•    There are now Google Doc’s and Microsoft Live blocks
•    Birbeck have developed a Federated Access Management Block
•    Developers have the ability to use the Google Apps engine to create new features. i.e. Edinburgh  has developed a virtual field trip.
•    Purdue have developed the Purdue Signal block. This delivers “learning analytics” from data derived by tracking student engagement with the course. This can then be subsequently used to predict assessment failure or attrition rates.
•    There is a BB STATS tool that can be used to deliver real-time course usage data to an Android phone.

Open Standards;

As yet; no one, apart from the JISC funded CELTIC project (integrating ELGG, WebPA, and PebblePad) appear to making any use of the LTI Open Standards!  I found this to be quite surprising, considering the potential it offers.  Maybe it is just too new for universities to experiment with, as we are all too busy testing service packs!

2 Responses to “Blackboard news”

  1. Tim  on August 23rd, 2011

    I’m a bit dazed by some of this terminology. What is the difference between a plugin, extension, block or module? Firefox seems to have most of them as web extensions of different sorts, but Bb seems to have similar names for the same thing doing something different!

  2. George Kroner  on August 25th, 2011

    Hi!

    I’m happy to clear up some of that terminology for you. Although you hear many terms such as plugins, extensions, Building Blocks, and modules being used – all of these refer to the same thing – the ability to add additional capabilities to “out-of-the-box” Blackboard. These additional capabilities embed themselves into the same places you’d normally expect to find your other tools – in the course control panel, the user tools area, the student tools area, and the content creation menus to name a few. Modules render themselves as portal modules either on the Blackboard home page or the course-level home page.

    I’d also like to add a little bit to the open standards conversation, too. Full LTI is not yet a final standard, and a lot of the tools referenced in the presentation were developed before LTI existed, so I can understand your disappointment. This said, Basic LTI is available in its final 1.0 form and is quickly becoming pervasive. Just about every new integration I’m seeing supports this standard, and many of Blackboard’s own integrations are being built on top of (or re-engineered to use) this standard. Although BLTI is new, we’re seeing more and more tools becoming available for individual instructors to add to their own courses without the need to install or maintain Building Blocks. In a few cases, we’ve even seen individual faculty members using BLTI to link to discipline-specific tools they themselves or their graduate students have built – directly from their VLE! I certainly agree that there is a lot of potential here.


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