Tag Archives: blackboard

Teaching, tutorial, Uncategorized

Need to Move a Course from Blackboard to Brightspace?

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If your course was not one of the courses that was automagically moved from Blackboard to Brightspace, you may be wondering how to move it yourself.

The first thing you should look for is whether ANY version of the course you want to export has already been brought to Brightspace.  You may have more than one.  For example you might have a Fall 2021 copy and an empty shell for Fall 2022.  If what you want is in the Fall 2021 copy, you don’t need to export anything from Blackboard – it is already there.

If absolutely no version of the course you want to bring over exists in Brightspace (perhaps something you haven’t taught in a while AND you aren’t teaching it in the fall either), pause following these directions to make a ticket for a “Bb course copy shell in Brightspace” where you will include the Course Designator & Number (example: BIO 203). After you have some place to put your export, continue with these steps. If you only have the 2022 shell in Brightspace and you don’t want to move your old course directly into 2022 (very wise move!), also complete that same ticket.

The second thing that I want you to know is that Brightspace cannot import courses that are greater in size than 2 gigs.  You may not know what the size of your Blackboard course is until you export it, so perhaps don’t worry about this right away, but if after exporting the course it turns out to be too big, just remember what I started with here.  If it is too big, this will probably be due to large presentations or documents that you loaded directly into your blackboard course.  You will need to remove these items and host them elsewhere.

For example:

  • Videos can be moved to echo360 or youtube
  • Documents can be moved to google drive
  • etextbooks can be moved to google drive or check to see if they are available via the library

Exporting a course doesn’t work exactly like it used to work in Blackboard, so if you have done it in the past, read this anyway.

NOTE: For a far less verbose version of this post, please see this link.

Go to your course that you want to bring into Brightspace.  Go to Packages and Utilities under Course Management in the left menu.  Under Packages and Utilities, select Export/Archive Course.

Select Export Package.

Under Select Course Materials, “select all”. 

THEN UNSELECT SETTINGS — this is the new part that changed

Click Submit and wait.

Success: This action has been queued. An email will be sent when the process is complete.

When the export is finished it will show up on this page if you hit refresh.

You might, like me, think “download” would be in this pull down menu:

It isn’t though.  Just click on the name of your export to download it to your computer.

Now go to Brightspace.

Enter the course you want to import the content into.

TIP:  You can use your Fall 2021 course to bring in other semesters content too.  That way you have one place for all versions of a particular course you have taught.  Like a box of all things BIO 203 – regardless of what semester it came from. 

Go to Course Admin

Find the Catagory “Site Resources”

Click on Import/Export/Copy Components

Select Import Components (at the bottom of the page) and click start.

Click upload and select the zip export file you downloaded from Blackboard.  If this is a big file, it will take a little time to upload and you won’t be able to select Import All Components until it has finished. If your export file was bigger than 2 gigs, see the “second thing” to know at the top of this blog post.

 

Assuming for a moment that you imported the content into a location that is not the “live” course you will be teaching from, go to the course that you will be teaching from and go back to the Course Admin -> Site Resources -> Import/Export/Copy Components area again, and this time select “Copy Components from another Org Unit”.

You will be able to search for the location you copied the course to, and select just the items you want to bring to the “live” course shell.  This way you aren’t pulling years worth of unneeded items into the live course, just the pieces that you know you want.

TIP: Keep your non-live course storage organized by semester and year if you have the desire to bring many semesters worth of the same course over. Try to help your future self find what you would be looking for.

Don’t forget to do some housekeeping on any content you bring over to the “live” course.  Check for correct dates, availability, exceptions, links, formatting, accessibility, etc.

 

Keep Teaching, troubleshooting, tutorial

Creating a VoiceThread Assignment that is tied to the Blackboard Grade Center

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To create a VoiceThread Assignment, you will go to Build Content -> Mashups -> VoiceThread.
Make sure to enable Grading.
Screen Shot 2020-04-30 at 9.05.25 AM.png
If you forgot to do this part, you will not see the Assignment Builder option in the next step.  You can go back and enable grading if you need to:
1. Edit the VoiceThread link that you’ve already built in Blackboard.
2. Scroll to the grading section and make sure that “Enable Evaluation” is set
to “Yes.”
3. Set the number of points your assignment is worth.
4. Save.Now Click Assignment Builder.

Screen Shot 2020-04-30 at 9.06.56 AM.png
.

After you click on Assignment Builder you will have options of VT assignment types:

This is the Create a VT option:
Notice the option to allow resubmitted assignments
This is the Submit a Comment VT assignment option:
Note the name of my assignment is VT test.
The watch a VT assignment looks much the same where you have to select the already built VT (or create a new VT that you want them to watch).
The Grade Center won’t show that something has been submitted, but as soon as
you enter the grade into the VoiceThread assignment, that grade will be passed
back to Blackboard for you automatically.
Keep Teaching, troubleshooting

Image not Appearing in Test?

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This is from the Bb listserv.  I thought it might be of interest.

 

…yesterday we had an instructor report that students could not see images in
test questions, but they could. After extensive testing, we discovered that
if the ‘Display Until’ date has passed, the images will no longer appear.In our situation…
Due to a recent issue of students cheating, the instructor set a 10 or 15
minute time window where students had to start the test.They did this by
using the ‘Display After’ and ‘Display Until’ settings. The test was
setup to present/display “One at a time”. When the ‘Display Until’ date
passed, the images no longer appeared in the test. The test continued to
function as normal and the text is all there, just the images do not
display and instead a broken image icon displayed. If the ‘Display Until’
date was changed to in the future, the images reappeared.

I submitted a support ticket to Bb Support and after submission it gives
you potentially related articles. One of those was a Nov 06,2015 “Article
No.- 000041338- Assessment Images and Other Attached Files Cannot be Viewed
While Inside a Test After Display Until Time”:
https://blackboard.secure.force.com/btbb_articleview?id=kA3700000004EdO

So our particular issue has been around for a while and doesn’t appear is
planned to be fixed anytime soon.

Jeffrey Ries
Applications Administrator/LMS
IT-Educational Technology & Media Services
University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa

assessment, Keep Teaching, Teaching, tests, tutorial

All Those Test Options in Blackboard & How to Give a Synchronous Test*

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This blog entry is going to focus on the options in Blackboard that have to do with the timing of an test.

When you are first creating the Test.. these options are found under the Test Information area and span a few sections.  If you have already made the test you can find these options by clicking the chevron next to the test name and clicking “Edit the Test Options”.

Force Completion


When you set this option, if the student looses the connection or accidentally closes the browser, they will be unable to go back and finish the test. (Without you having to intervene anyway.)  We don’t recommend enabling this setting.

Set Timer

This option gives the student a visible countdown timer during the test. It begins after the test description and instructions have been displayed. If Auto-Submit  is selected, at the end of the count down, it ends the test, no matter where they were.  If Auto-Submit is not checked, you will see an exclamation point in the grade center and have the option to adjust the grade, if they went long.

If the Force Completion is not set, and a student looses their connection or accidentally closes the browser, they will be able to continue taking the test, and the timer will continue from when it initially started. (eg., If they loose the connection for 10 minutes, they loose that 10 minutes.)

Display After and Until

A better way of handling whether students can see the test, rather than the “Make the Link Available” option.  Also consider, they can’t start what they cannot see.  *So if you want everyone to be done by 1pm and you have a 30 minute timer with auto-submit enabled, consider Display Until to end around 12:30. 

Due Date

Due dates (and times) do not affect the test availability (unless you choose the Do not allow students to start the Test if the due date has passed option), but rather provide a flag on the test if it was started or ended after the due date/time.

Test Availability Exceptions

This section allows you to make test rule exceptions for people that need accommodations, or have other needs depending on language or technology situations.

If these settings exist for a test or survey, you can create these exceptions:

  • Number of attempts
  • Timer
  • Availability: Date and time the test is available to the student or group
  • Force completion
  • Restrict location

 

Have any interesting testing stories to tell?  What other testing options do you have questions about?  Please comment below!

This blog is a cross post from https://you.stonybrook.edu/academictechnologyservices

assessment, Keep Teaching, Teaching, tutorial

Accepting Videos as an Alternative form of Course Assessment

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This is about using a echo360 mashup tool to accept video submissions inside of Blackboard and which instructor will be able to grade under Needs Grading in the Grade Center.  This is an excellent alternative to high stakes grading via traditional exams.

First you will want to create an assignment. You will go to your Assignments area and go to Assessments -> Assignment.

Give it a name and add instructions for the students to follow.

Create a due date and points possible for the presentation.

Make the assignment available to the students.

Submit.

 

What the students see:  (You can also see this yourself using the student preview mode, entered by clicking on this icon in the upper right part of the screen in blackboard:

Under assignments, they locate your assignment and click in it’s name.

They see the points possible and the instructions that you wrote previously.

They need to click on Write Submission to get to the Blackboard WYSIWYG editor. They should type the name of their assignment into this text box and then select the Mashups button.

Then they click on Mashups -> Echo360 Video Library

This opens a new window for them where they have three choices.    They can choose any video already in their echo360 video library. (That is Choose From My Home), they can create something new (Create New Media) or Upload a video they have on their computer. This is what the different options look like:

Choose from home allows the student to either browse or search for files in their echo360 library.

Create New Media will give them the option to Launch Universal Capture from their computer.

Where they can name the video and start recording from their webcam, desktop and audio.

and finally Upload Existing:

Here they can grab videos from their cloud storage locations or browse from their computer.

After they have typed the name of their presentation and selected the video, they will click submit.

After submitting they will get a submission confirmation:

As the instructor, you can find the student submission under Needs Grading in the Grade Center:

…where I will see the list of submitted assignments and I can either chose Grade All or go through them one by one.  Here is the assignment I submitted and you can view the presentation, grade it and leave feedback for the learner right here.

Keep Teaching, Teaching, tutorial

Two Ways to Recycle Older Echo360 Content for Online Usage

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If you were the primary instructor for a course within Echo360 for a prior semester’s recordings, you can easily reuse those recordings for this semester.

First option:  Just put the entire semester into this semester’s blackboard.

You will want to login to Blackboard, go to the course area that you want your link with Echo360 to appear (typically some content folder) and “Build Content” -> “Echo Cloud”.

Now give the link a name. This may be something like “Course Videos”, “Video Lectures”, etc.

Click “Submit”.

You now click on that link you just made.

Connect your Echo360 Content

Select the Term, Course and Section that your want to reuse from.

 

Now Click the lighter blue button that says “Link Content”

The entire list of videos from the older class will now appear for your students.

Option 2:

Curate the videos that you want your students to use from your Echo360 Library.

For this, you will login to echo36.org with your netid and password.  [If you are not currently using Echo360 for your current course, first make a link to the section you’re teaching now by following these directions and then come back to these directions. Alternatively, contact tlt_its@stonybrook.edu for assistance in creating the section.]

Select the tab “My Content”

Hover over the video you want to use, and “…” will appear in the lower right, select “Share”.

from the Share Settings screen you will find many ways of sharing the video.  We are going to use the “Class” option.

Select the current course that you want this video to be loaded into. Select New Class, name the topic of the class, the date that you expect them to view it, describe it if you want, and make decisions about when you want the video to be available to view.

Do this for all of the videos that you want in your blackboard site.  When you check the link you created in the blackboard site, you will see all the videos you chose listed.

 

 

 

Keep Teaching, Uncategorized

Creating new sections in Echo360

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You may want to need to create a new section in Echo360 if you have need to store videos and/or power points for a course, but have not used Echo360 so far this semester.

 

To create a new section in Echo360, we will want to login to Blackboard, go to the course area that you want your link with Echo360 to appear (typically some content folder) and “Build Content” -> “Echo Cloud”.

Now give the link a name. This may be something like “Course Videos”, “Video Lectures”, etc.

Click “Submit”.

You now click on that link you just made.

Connect your Echo360 Content

Select the Term, Select your Course, and then select “Create a New Section”.

Enter the Section Number in the form 01, 02 etc.

Description is optional

Click Save

Now Click the lighter blue button that says “Link Content”

You can now begin to upload content to your course for this section by clicking New Class.  A Class is going to be the day that you want the students to view the content. You select the date first and then after that Class is created you can upload associated content by click on the plus sign in that row. Content can be videos, or powerpoint type presentations.

 

tutorial

How to Set Up Test Exceptions in Blackboard (how to let a student take the test at a different time from everyone else…)

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So you have a student who can not possibly take your online exam when the rest of the class will be taking it.  What do you do?

You can give them a different time to take the test.  Also, if you want you can have a few different times to begin with and put the students into groups – each group getting a block of time of your choosing.  Let’s walk through just giving an individual student a new time to take the test.

Go to your test in Blackboard.

Use the menu that shows up when you hover over the title of your exam, and choose Edit the Test Options.

Go to the Test Availability Exceptions area.

Click Add User or Group

Check the box next to the user that needs to take the exam at a different time. Hit submit.

Now click on the small Calendar icon and pick the date and time of the exam. Make sure the minutes are the same as you indicated for everyone else.

Click Save.  Click Submit.

 

grades, Teaching, tutorial

New Box View grading in blackboard

Video Leave a comment

Just change the ending to “if you have any questions, please feel free to contact CELT at 2-2777 or celt@stonybrook.edu”

If you want to be able to use these inline editing features, have your students submit MS Word .docx or .doc files.

grades, troubleshooting, tutorial

Oldie but goodie – scrollbars missing in Blackboard

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Let’s set the stage:

You are in your Blackboard grade center in your course.

There are plenty of columns, in fact you are pretty sure there are more than you can see at the moment.  But … there is the vertical scroll bar… and there, I’m pretty sure, is where  the horizontal scroll bar should be, but it is not.

Did I mention that you are on a Mac?  (I am too, no shame there.)

OK – this is a system setting on your Mac.  Go to the Apple menu.

Select “System Preferences…”

Now select General.

and finally, make sure “Show scroll bars:” is set to Always.