Blackboard What Is New – 9.1 April 2014

We upgraded to Blackboard Learn™ 9.1 April 2014 on 12/27/2014.

Release Highlights

New Portfolio: Seamlessly import course assignments and personal artifacts into the rebuilt, user-friendly portfolio. You can also easily share snapshots to showcase achievements or use for assessment purposes.

Improved SafeAssign Integration: We’ve enhanced the SafeAssign service to deeply integrate with native Blackboard Learn assignments and inline grading, bringing plagiarism prevention into core instructor and student workflows. Instead of being a separate content type, SafeAssign is now simply a checkbox on any assignment. SafeAssign also handles multiple attempts and attachments, drafts, and group submissions.

We’ve also streamlined and enhanced the SafeAssign Originality Report. Along with some UI changes, the originality report contains more information and has a modern, user-friendly interface.

Student Preview: Quickly view and validate the design of your course content and course behaviors from the perspective of a student. You no longer need to waste time creating and managing test accounts.

Anonymous and Delegated Grading: Grade anonymously and assign grading responsibilities to other assistants, TAs, or reviewers in large courses.

Changes

Feature Description To Learn More
Assessments: Significant Figures In calculated formula questions, instructors can select the number of decimals or significant figures for the correct answers generated by the system. Instructor
Grading: Anonymous Grading Instructors can hide student names from submitted assignments for anonymous grading. Instructor
Student
Grading: Delegated Grading Instructors can delegate grading to specific users. Instructor
My Grades The look and feel of My Grades has been updated. Students can now view feedback by clicking View Feedback. Student
Portfolio Improvements Portfolios are now accessed from the global navigation and have a new authoring canvas. Instructors can create portfolio assignments. Instructor
Student
SafeAssign Integration SafeAssign is integrated into regular Learn assignments. Instructor
Student
SafeAssign Originality Report Changes The SafeAssign originality report has been changed in the following ways:

  • The report has been updated with a new look and feel. The report now displays multiple attachments.
  • The email option has been removed. While viewing the report, you can “print to pdf” either natively or using a plug-in based on the operating system and browser combination that you are using to create an accessible PDF. Then, you can share the PDF in multiple ways, including secure email.
  • Each source now has a color unique to the source. Text matching the source is highlighted in the unique source color. There are a maximum of 30 different colors. This matches the maximum of 30 different sources.
  • By default, all citation source highlighting is on. Instructors can click Show/Hide All Highlighting to turn source highlighting off and on for all sources at once.
  • The report layout has been improved for narrow screens. The report information and citations now appear at the top of the submission when instructors reduce the width of the viewing area.
  • Instructors click Select Sources and Resubmit to determine which sources they want to include in the next report. By default, all sources are included. Instructors can clear the check box for each source to exclude from the results. This behavior is the reverse of previous releases.
  • The page instructors are redirected to after resubmitting a paper has been updated to be more in line with the styling of the new report.
  • During the redesign of the SafeAssign originality report, it became clear that the mixed script count was potentially showing misleading and confusing information. The mixed script count identifies the potential of multiple scripts used in an assignment to hide acts of plagiarism. It was discovered that the count was based on the number of words or sentences in the text and was only triggered by Cyrillic. The count should be based on all of the ways multiple scripts can be used to avoid plagiarism detection. Also, the areas where each script was used were not identified in the document and had to be manually located. For these reasons, while the originality report continues to alert you to any use of mixed-script characters within individual words anywhere in a submission, the word count will not be available until it can be accurate for all script combinations and all instances can be highlighted in the report.
 Instructor
Student Preview Instructors can view their course exactly as a student does by using a student account the system generates for them. Instructor