Plagiarism has always been very difficult for institutions to measure and control, but since a flood of resources has become easily available through the Internet, the problem has grown exponentially. Students writing papers need only do a Web search on the topic for access to thousands of ideas, opinions and arguments, already thought through for them. Furthermore, students do not always understand how to properly cite and attribute borrowed content to maintain the originality of their work. Regardless of intent, plagiarism presents the very real dilemma of some students gaining unfair advantages over others. Unsurprisingly, institutions are still searching for effective methods of deterrence and prevention.*

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The new courses for the academic year 2008-2009 are available. In total we have created 3677 courses. If your course is not available, please make sure the course is available in CourseBase. When a course is made available in CourseBase, it will be available in Blackboard the next day.

 If you have any questions, you can contact blackboard-support.

We have installed a new version of the Advanced Group Tool. This version has a lot of improvements:

• Include instructors
  Per course you can now decide to include instructors in the maximum group size if you use self-enroll or a automatically enroll students.
  
• Maximum group size adjustable per group
  In the previous version the group size was applicable for all groups. In this version you can set the group size per group.
  
• Import check on course enrollement
  If you import a CSV-file the script will check if the user is enrolled in the course.
  
• Bug fixes
  There are multiple bugfixes in this version. The most important one is that Self-enroll now works correctly on a load-balanced system.

For help you can use this manual:

• Handleiding Nederlands
• English manual 

We have added a new building block that gives a detailed view of the disk usage of your course or organisation. You find this tool via the Control Panel in the box Course Tools. Below you see an example of the report.

The entirely new Grade Center offers a number of improvements over the old gradebook. One of the most significant changes is that faculty can now customize Grade Center; this means common tasks will require fewer clicks. Other useful features include:

• In-cell editing
• New weighting formulas that allow dropping of the lowest grade(s)
• Full spreadsheet format download and simple upload of grades
• Always visible student names and column headings
• A grade history sheet, to track when grades are updated and changed
• The ability to add comments of any length, send e-mail from within Grade Center, handle exemptions from the central navigation page and create "Smartviews" based on personal preferences.

Manuals

• Grade Center Unmasked
• Quick start manual
• Full instructor manual

Quick tutorials

• Grade Center: Determining Grades and Exemptions
• Grade Center: Analyzing Grades (differentiated instruction orientation
• Grade Center: Customizing the Grade Center

Since this summer the dropbox is no longer available. Blackboard offers a very good alternative, the Assignment Tool. To get to know the assignment tool, you can watch this instruction video or read these posts:

• How to use the Assignment Tool?
• How to Submit your Assignment?
• How to view a individual student's Submitted Work?
• How to download and view mulitple files of an assignment?

With a little delay, the daily update is now also running. The delay was caused by the fact that when we were running the script in a nightly job, the content of the courses of last year where copied again into the new course. This is not what we wanted.

After consulting with Blackboard, we have decided to change the script for daily use. This means that the courses that weren't created on August 1^st, don't have a copy of the course of last year. When we run the script today 20 new courses were created.

Next to this, we also discovered a bug in the script with the staff enrollments. We fixed this, so the intructors now all have access to their courses. If not, please contact Blackboard Support.

In the new release of Blackboard the discussion board is completely renewed and enhanced with extra functionalities:

• Subscribe to forum - email alerts of changes to content.
• Moderate forum - require messages to be reviewed before they are published.
• Grade - grade forum or threads and add comments in the gradebook.
• Roles - user roles such as participant, moderator, reader, grader and blocked.
• Peer rating of posts.
• Improved search functionality - can search the Discussion board or all the fora within a course (i.e. including group discussions).
• Students ability to remove posts can be set to only allow them to remove their post if there are no replies.

Backup to overview 

There are a few changes to the online assessment tool in Blackboard 7.2, this includes, when setting the quiz you can;

• Set the number of attempts to any number you like - when the student sits the quiz they get a running total of the number of attempts. When the student reaches the set number then it doesn’t allow you to sit the test again.
• Yhe gradebook stores each attempt (on more than one attempt quizzes) that the student undertakes.
• You can also set the quiz results page so no information is given at the end of the quiz, for instance, you do not even need to show the score.
• You can add text based comments to each attempt through the gradebook - students can view this through their “my grades” area.
• The student get the score (highest) of the attempt, but they can get full details through the my grades area.
• You can exclude the assessment from appearing in the gradebook - so if it’s purely formative then you don’t need it cluttering up your gradebook.

Backup to overview 

The early warning system allows instructors to identify students who are not keeping up with their coursework, and notify them as early as possible. It is especially useful for sending emails to contact students who have not been accessing Blackboard for a period of time and therefore haven't seen important announcements. It also allows tutors to identify students who have done well on an assessment and provide positive feedback. Notification messages can be generated based on graded assessment, late or missing course work, or last date of access to the Blackboard course. The instructor can use the default message or modify it to customise the message. The system also keeps a notification log, which can be used to verify that the student was alerted to a problem.

 

Backup to overview