WOOL Blog: Ram-ping Up Your Instructional Technology

I. Test Exceptions Overview You may need to add test exceptions for students who need to take an online test at a different time, need extended time, or have other extenuating circumstances. The following can be created as test exceptions: Number of attempts Timer Availability Force completion Depending on your testing policy, students who have experienced technical issues during the testing session may be provided with another attempt to re-take the test. However, as long as Force Completion  was not checked for a test and the student did not run out of time, then he/she would be able to return to the test and complete it with the remaining time. For this reason, consider using a timer with or without auto-submit instead of the Force Completion setting. II. How to Add Test Exceptions To add test exceptions, you will need to access your deployed test in your Blackboard course and select Edit Test Options . Scroll to the Test Availability Exceptions sectio...

In this post, you will find an overview of the one of the most useful pieces of software available in the Blackboard toolkit: Respondus Lockdown Browser. Respondus Lockdown Browser is a web browser just like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Microsoft Edge, but with a few extra features designed for assessments in the modern classroom. Respondus Lockdown Browser works with Blackboard to make exams more secure. When using the Respondus Browser to take an exam, students are unable to open other computer programs, windows or tabs in the browser, and copy, paste, or print. This makes Respondus Lockdown Browser ideal for proctored environments, such as a computer lab or classroom, where students take the exam together and at a common time. For fully online courses where you may never meet your students, Respondus offers an additional layer of security to help ensure academic integrity: Respondus Monitor. In addition to the features of Respondus Browser, Monitor enables a student...

When your course is created in Blackboard, it is created with a default course menu. While this menu can be useful as is, customizing the menu can help you create more intuitive navigation for your learners. [1] To begin, hover over one of the items on your course menu and click the drop-down arrow. Here you are able to rename, hide, or delete the link. Delete any items you don't need. Do note if you delete a content folder containing content, you will also delete that content. [2] To reorder the course menu, hover over an item and click on the up-down arrow beside the item you want to move until. Drag and drop the item in its new location on the course menu. (Note: If you're having issues moving items on the course menu, first try to clear your browser's cache, close the browser, and reopen Blackboard:  How to clear your cache in Chrome , How to clear your cache in Firefox ) [3] You may also add a variety of items to your course menu. You may link to a conten...

In Blackboard, the course entry point is the first page students see when they access your course. By default, the course entry point is set to the Home Page tool, show below. However, it can be more helpful for both you and your students to alter the course entry point to a location or tool more useful for your course - or even for a certain time during the semester. To change the course entry point, navigate to Teaching Style under the Customization menu. Simply choose a new entry point from the drop down menu located halfway down the Teaching Style page. That's it! You might choose to change this to another tool you make use of more often, such as Announcements or the Discussion Board. Also, know this course entry point can be updated at anytime, so consider updating to to any location that may better suite the course. For example, set the entry point to a Getting Started section for the first week of class. Once students get acclimated to the course, swit...

If you've used Blackboard to grade student assignments, then you're likely familiar with the integrated inline grading features provided through Crocodoc. Crocodoc allowed students and instructors to view PDF and Word files directly within Blackboard and add annotations such as comments, highlights, strike outs, and drawings to the submitted assignment. However, Crocodoc displayed only a very limited number of file types. Winthrop University has upgraded to Box as the inline grading tool. PDF and Word files are still displayed directly within Blackboard, but Box offers many more supported file types for inline viewing including picture files such as .jpeg and .png, video files such as .mp4, and sound files such as .mp3. For a full list of supported file types, please visit the following site: File Types and Fonts Supported in Box Content Preview Here's a side-by-side comparison of the two views. The one on the left is the old Crocodoc view, and the one on the right is t...

In this blog post, we will show you how to quickly resolve a common playback issue with embedded videos in your Blackboard course. After copying your course content into your new sections for the semester, you may have noticed certain embedded videos display the error message shown below. This issue can often be resolved in less than a minute by following these steps. First, access the edit menu for the location where the video is embedded. Click on the yellow video placeholder in the text box, and click the "edit embedded media" option. On the following screen, you will see a drop down pane labelled "Type". To correct the playback issue, toggle from HTML 5 Video to Iframe, and then back to HTML5 Video. Select "update" and submit your changes. Your video should now play correctly within the browser. If you still have issues with video playback or have any questions about this process, please do not hesitate to contact us at...

As we head toward the end of the semester, you have probably begun thinking about your Spring 2018 courses. We have blogged before about some of the helpful features in Blackboard that make preparing for a new semester easier: copying materials into your new courses , setting availability and due dates efficiently , and exporting or archiving your older courses for safe-keeping. Likewise, making tweaks to your syllabus, updating your assignment descriptions, or replacing older presentations with a new ones can also eat up valuable time. In this post, you will find a quick way to replace older files and documents with new ones using the "Overwrite File" option in the Content Collection. First, some helpful background information: each document you upload to Blackboard is automatically added to the Content Collection. For example, you will find a copy of your syllabus in the Content Collection if you have added it somewhere in your course. A. Syllabus as it appears in ...

Do you ever feel lost in Blackboard, sorting through your long list of courses, or feel like navigating out from one course and into the another is cumbersome? Here is a quick tip to help you jump between your most relevant courses. Enter a Blackboard course. Under the "Winthrop University" tab, you'll see a home icon and a drop-down arrow.  Click the arrow, and then from the list, choose title of the course you'd like to switch to. At the top of the list, you'll find your most recently visited courses; you do not have to sort through all of your courses to find the ones most relevant to you this term. Voila! You're in the new course in the exact same location in Blackboard (eg. Grade Center, Announcements) with the quick click of the mouse. For more information about Blackboard, please visit our website at  https://www.winthrop.edu/onlinelearning .

When you enter your Blackboard course and are adding content or reorganizing materials, you are likely in Edit Mode. Edit Mode allows you to add, delete, move, and change settings of the materials in your course. You can check to see that you're in Edit Mode by looking at the top right corner of your course. When in Edit Mode, the indicator will have a green dot and states that "Edit Mode is ON" However, there are two other modes that you can enter: Edit Mode Off, and Student Preview Mode. The following chart highlights some of the basic differences between these two modes. Edit Mode Off Student Preview Mode View the course from the student's perspective Determine which items are hidden from the student's view due to availability settings, empty content, or adaptive release settings Disable ability to add, delete, move, or change any settings of the materials in your course Complete student activities such as taking tests, submitting assign...

Whether you have just copied over an older course section to current one, as we discussed in our last blog , or you have recently built a course from scratch, chances are you have some tweaking to do with due dates and availability before the Fall. In this post, we will show you the most efficient way of setting up all the date and time criteria in your course using the Data Management tool. Date Management allows you to adjust availability and due date permissions for any Blackboard items currently using them - not only assignments and tests. For example, you can also adjust settings for Announcements, Discussion Boards, Journals, and even folders or modules that have availability parameters. Date management is housed alongside the same course tools you use most often. You will find it about halfway down the list of course tools under the content management pane. Upon selected the tool, you will be presented with three options for adjusting your dates. Use Course Start Dat...

Copy a Course In Blackboard it is possible to copy one course to another using the course copy feature. This is useful if you have designed and developed a course you'd like to use again. Follow these 8 simple steps below to complete your course copy: 1. Open the course that you would like to copy the materials FROM . 2. On the Control Panel of that course (left, blue menu), click on Packages and Utilities. 3. Click Course Copy. 4. The Copy Course screen will appear. Click on the Browse button to select the Destination Course ID. 5. A list of your courses will appear. Select the appropriate destination course that you would like to copy the materials TO . 6. Click the Submit button at the bottom of the window. 7. Click on the Select All button to be sure that you copy ALL of the course materials over to the new or existing course. Otherwise, select only items you would like to copy. Note: You may want to change discussion board option to Inc...

Are you planning your fall course yet? Thinking about how an online course might differ from a face-to-face course or trying to overcome some obstacles with student expectations in your online course? Consider some of the following tips in this post on writing your online course syllabus in order to get your courses started with clear communication and expectations. Online courses provide students with flexibility. They're available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so students can work when they have time to work. However, they sometimes also need help in those wee hours of the night or whenever they're working in the course, and they want you, the instructor to be available to help them. We know that's not always possible. We'd do anything to support our students, but we also have families, scholarship, other courses, hobbies, oh and sleep that take up our time. It's impossible to be as available to our students as the course content is. Consider the following tw...

A few weeks ago, we posted instructions for exporting your course gradebooks to keep for your records. This week, we are going to help you take your summer “housekeeping” a step further by detailing how, and why, to export or archive your courses. When you export or archive a course from Blackboard, your course is condensed into a single ZIP folder that you can save to a computer or storage device for safe keeping. In both instances, your course layout, assignments, exams, grading schemas, adaptive release criteria, etc, are preserved within this ZIP folder. This ZIP folder can then be uploaded into Blackboard at a later date to recreate these components. However, archiving and exporting differ in one very important area: exporting a course does not preserve student data, whereas archiving a course does preserve student data. When archiving a course, the final ZIP folder also contains student enrollment, assignment submissions, grades, discussion board and wiki contributions, and ...

It's finally summer! Some of you are enjoying time off, catching up on scholarship, or even teaching summer school. Regardless of your summer plans, it's always good to do a little Blackboard housekeeping before the previous term is too far behind us.  We recommend downloading your Blackboard course gradebook(s) for your records. Just follow these five simple steps below to access and save an Excel file of your course gradebooks. Step 1: Access your the Full Grade Center in your Blackboard Course Step 2: In the top right corner, select Work Offline , and then choose Download. Step 3: Leave all of the settings as is, and select Submit. Step 4: On the following screen, select Download. Step 5: Open your downloaded Excel spreadsheet and save it to your desired location and/or print a copy for your records.