What’s New

Here are the latest features added by our tool providers.

March 2023

  • Blackboard
    • Improvements to Blackboard Assignments – An enhancement has been made to cut out the number of clicks when grading students who has submitted multiple attempts.
    • Course Activity report – The report available from the Analytics tab in every Blackboard Ultra site has had a number of features added or improved, including the ability to see how many days a student has been inactive.
    • Reschedule announcementsThis enhancement allows announcements to be re-used without copying them. It will promote a pop up for any student when they enter the course if they have not yet seen it under the rescheduled timings.

February 2023

  • Blackboard
    • Progress Tracking enhancements – A further addition to the progress tracking feature now gives an instructor the ability to filter whether or not a piece of content is hidden to a student (i.e. if it is not available or has a release condition applied).  Also, if a student downloads an accessible version of a piece of content via Blackboard Ally, this will now update the progress indicator to “started”.
    • Gradable overview screen now sortable – Items in the gradable items view within the Gradebook are now sortable.  This is useful to assist finding items quicker for grading. 
    • Show group members – Instructors can now see members allocated to group from the course groups page.  Students will also be able to see groups and members for groups where they have membership.
    • Hotspot question type in Blackboard tests – The hotspot feature has been enhanced to add a polygon shape which can then be used to draw more complex shapes.  This allows greater flexibility when defining areas of an image for students to select.

January 2023

  • Blackboard –
    • Messages – Messaging to a course role – This heavily requested enhancement allows for any instructor to choose to message solely all students or all instructors (within a course/module site).  These options are in addition to the previous options available. 
    • Tests – Question and Page randomisation – In a previous release a feature was added to allow different questions to be placed on different pages.  This enhancement gives the option for those pages to be presented in a random order and randomisation of questions within those separate pages. 
    • Discussion boards – Enhancement to allow the locking of a forum after a due date is reached. 
    • Integrated tool logos show in gradebook and grades tab – Icons of third-party tools that integrate with Blackboard (e.g. Turnitin) will now show the logo of the tool instead of the default rocket symbol. 

December 2022

  • Blackboard
    • Drag and Drop – improved responsiveness and more deliberate action when re-ordering content
    • Course Links – the ability to link to an existing piece of content within the same module/course (similar to a ‘shortcut’)
    • Single Student Progess Report – a new progress report for an individual student showing their journey through a module/course (note: Progress Tracking must be switched on in the left-side Details & Actions menu)
    • Content Copying – improvements to content copying from other modules/courses, including a larger panel to work within.

November 2022

October 2022

  • Blackboard – the first phase of a ‘student progress tracking’ report for Instructors – showing when students have opened or viewed content within a Blackboard site.
  • ReCapadvanced search options in both the full Manage Media area and within the Media Chooser.
  • Respondus LockDown Browser – now available for use on Tests in Blackboard Ultra modules. Please speak to your Digital Academic Developer if you are interested in using this.

September 2022

August 2022

July 2022

June 2022

May 2022

April 2022