What’s New | TEL Knowledge Base for Staff

Here are the latest features added by our tool providers.

Blackboard –
- Impro vements 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 announcements – This 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.

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.

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.

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.

Blackboard – the first phase of a ‘student progress tracking’ report for Instructors – showing when students have opened or viewed content within a Blackboard site.
ReCap – advanced 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.

Blackboard – new home page and Base Navigation (orientation video for staff ; orientation video for students)
Box of Broadcasts – BoB Curated Playlists
Collaborate – Session Engagement Insights