Stony Brook's Blackboard system has been updated ...What's new?

By DoIT Communications

Grade student work with Blackboard Annotate!

Check out our new tool called Bb Annotate! You can use Bb Annotate for inline grading. Bb Annotate offers a more robust feature set to provide customizable feedback to students. Features include a sidebar summary view, freehand drawing tools, various color selections, and much more.

For more information, visit: https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Assignments/Grade_Assignments/Bb_Annotate

 

Past updates:

On December 30, 2019, the Division of Information Technology updated Stony Brook University's Blackboard Server. What exactly does this mean for instructors and students?!

The short answer is there are some new features that Faculty can make use of for their course management and organization, but overall Blackboard is what you have come to know with some minor back-end updates and bug-fixes that keep the system up and running in the modern technology environment. The most noteable feature additions are listed below!

NEW TOOL! Attendance Tool - Blackboard introduced a new tool available for our version, the Attendance Tool! Instructors have been asking for a way to track student attendance in Blackboard. The Blackboard Attendance Tool is a new feature that allows Instructors to track class attendance and automatically turn that data into a score in the Grade Center. This can be turned on in any class from the Course Management section and the Attendance data ties directly back to the Grade Center. This new functionality allows for simple tracking of student attendance in face-to-face and hybrid classes.  Instructors can mark students as Present, Late, Absent, or Excused and can grade by letter, point, or percentage by adjusting settings. For information about the Attendance Tool, read more here: https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Grade/Attendance

NEW FEATURE! Delegated Grading Permissions - For instructors who choose to set up assignments with Delegated Grading, a new option is available! An instructor can grant a Teaching Assistant or Grader in the course permissions to reconcile grades. Previously, this was restricted to an Instructor only. With this new permission, more options for grading and grade equity exist. For information about the new permissions for Delegated Grading, read more here: https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Assignments/Grade_Assignments/Delegated_Grading

NEW FEATURE! Additional Attempts with Anonymous Grading - For instructors who choose to set up assignments with Anonymous Grading, a new option is available! An instructor can grant a student an additional attempt without turning off the Anonymous Grading settings. Previously, if an instructor wanted to grant an additional attempt to a specific student, an instructor would have to grade all current submissions, and then turn off Anonymous Grading to allow an additional attempt. For information about the new option with Anonymous Grading, read more here: https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Assignments/Grade_Assignments/Anonymous_Grading

MAJOR FIX! Self & Peer Assessments - During the last Academic Year, faculty have reported issues with Blackboard's Self-and-Peer Assessment tool that caused a lot of headache. Blackboard released a repair for this issue, and DoIT has implemented it with this latest update to Blackboard.   We are asking all instructors who have had issues in the past to try these tools and report any and all issues that they find at:  service.stonybrook.edu

Other improvements with Blackboard include better adhereance to published web-accessibility standards, adoption of modern browser technologies such as WebRTC, a more mobile-friendly platform, and enhacements to navigation between course pages. 

For further information about this update, please contact CELT's Academic Technologies.

 

For More Information Contact


Academic Technology Services