Blackboard has some options that you can use make sure students get any individual assessment arrangements they may need.
Accommodations are applied to a student on a course level and will apply to any Blackboard Assignment or Test in the course. However, it does not apply to Turnitin assignments. Accommodations are good for students who have an ongoing arrangement that does not vary between assignments on the same course.
Students can have a Due Date accommodation or Time Limit Accommodation.
With a Dute Date Accommodation, work will never be marked as late in gradebook, although you are able to see when it was submitted. A Time Limit Accommodation gives the student extra time on any assessment with a timer.
Students with accommodations have a flag which is visible only to staff in the Grade Book, Roster, and on the Assessment. If a student with an accommodation is part of a group assignment, all students in the group will have the accommodation applied for that assignment.
Exceptions are made for students at a course level for individual assignments. Again, they do not apply to Turnitin assignments. Exceptions are good for students who may have a deadline extension for an individual piece of work. Exceptions can be used for additional attempts, rescheduled due dates, or extended access. Exceptions can only be applied to non-anonymous submissions – this means that they are useful for multiple choice tests that don’t require manual marking. They are visible only to staff through the Gradebook or Test Submission page.
All the information about Accommodations and Exceptions is available on the Blackboard Support site.
Instructors can now print assessments. Printing provides a convenient solution for a variety of use cases:
Accommodating students with specific needs or limited technology access
Providing a printed assessment for testing in designated locations
Backup and record keeping
Conducting offline assessment
Documentation and compliance
Maintaining security and integrity
The print option is available in Forms, Tests, and Assignments with questions. Printing also provides the option to save as PDF.
To print an assessment, from Content and Settings, select Print.
Note: Blackboard plan to support printing answer keys and question pools in upcoming releases.
Image below: Print option from a test
Image below: Select desired print options
Filter out graded responses when grading by question
The Needs Grading filter now filters out graded student responses by default. Filtering this way helps instructors to focus on any remaining ungraded responses for a given question. It also provides instructors with an improved view of their outstanding grading workload. If instructors want to include graded responses, they can select Show graded responses. This selection preference is now stored per course and it persists across assessments in each course.
Image below: Grading by question option with the grading status of Needs Grading filter selected
Image below: Grading by question view with the grading status filter of Needs Grading and Show graded responses options selected
Post immediately when creating announcements
Instructors can now post announcements as part of the drafting and editing processes. This makes the process of creating and posting announcements simpler.
Instructors can still post from the announcements page.
Image below: When creating or editing an announcement, there is now an option to post
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit would like to highlight five enhancements for Instructors from the November Blackboard Learn Ultra Update. These enhancements are in three areas:
Making your content more visual using Images.
Updates to Tests.
Managing your Gradebook.
Making your content more visual using images:
1. Image insertion option for Ultra Documents, Journals, Discussions, Assessment attempts, and Courses
Images play an important role in a student’s education experience. Images help to enhance comprehension of and engagement with course content. To help instructors more easily identify high-quality images, Blackboard have added a new image button in the content editor in the following places:
Ultra Documents
Journal prompts
Discussions
Course Messages
Image below: Instructor view – New image button on content editor for Ultra Documents.
When selected, the instructor has the following options:
Upload an image through selection or drag and drop.
Select a royalty-free, high-quality image from Unsplash.
Students can also access the new image button on the content editor in the following areas:
Discussion responses.
Assessments and test question inputs.
Course Messages.
Image below: Student view – New image button on content editor for discussion response.
Image below: Student view – Drag and drop or upload an image file.
After selecting the image, instructors and students can reposition the focus and zoom of the image. There’s also an option to alter the aspect ratio of the image.
Image below: Modify the zoom and focus of the image; set the aspect ratio.
Users can rename the image. It is important always to consider the accessibility of course content. The user should mark the image as decorative or provide suitable alternative text.
Instructors can also set the view and download file options for the image. After the image is inserted, the instructor can resize the image.
Updates to Tests:
2. Edit/Regrade in Questions
Instructors may spot a mistake in a test question when grading a test submission. For example, instructors may have found a typo, chosen a wrong answer, or wanted to adjust points.
In the past, the “Edit/Regrade Questions” option was only available when grading submissions by “Student.” Now, instructors can also access the Edit/Regrade workflow when grading by question.
Image below: Instructor view – Edit/Regrade option when grading a test by question.
Image below: Instructor view – editing a question using the Edit/Regrade option.
3. Matching question updates: partial credit auto-distribution and other updates
Matching questions are useful for testing a student’s skill in making accurate connections between related concepts. This question type also checks students’ understanding in a structured format.
To reward students who show partial understanding, some instructors wish to award partial and/or negative credit for matching questions.
In the past, instructors selected a scoring option:
allow partial credit.
all or nothing.
subtract points for incorrect matches, but question score can’t be negative.
or allow negative question scores.
These options were exclusive and, at times, created confusion for instructors.
Now, partial and negative credit is turned on by default. Blackboard auto-distributes partial credit as a percentage across the matching pairs. The auto-distribution of credit saves instructors time. Instructors can edit the partial credit values if needed to grant some pairs more or less credit. Values for partial credit must sum to 100%.
If desired, instructors may also specify a negative credit percentage to any pair. Negative credit is only assessed when applied and when a student mismatches a pair. If desired, instructors may choose to allow an overall negative score for the question.
We also made a few other improvements to this question:
Blackboard re-worded the question construction guidance and moved it to an info bubble.
In the past, the “reuse an answer” and “delete pair” options were behind the three-dot menu. Now, these options appear on the right side of the answer for each pair.
Before reused answers appeared as “Reused answer from pair #” in the answer field. Now, the answer itself is displayed in the answer field. “Reused answer” appears beneath the answer for the pair.
“Additional answers” renamed to “Distractors.”
Image below: New Matching question layout.
Managing your Gradebook:
4. Gradebook grid view performance improvements
Some instructors prefer to work in the gradebook grid view. To improve the user experience, we made several improvements to this view. These improvements address overall performance and reduce the load time.
Performance tested scenarios:
25K student enrolments and 400 gradable items: Load time reduced from 108 s (about 2 minutes) to 14s (87% performance improvement)
2000 student enrolments and 400 gradable items: Load time reduced from 19s to 8s (57% performance improvement)
40 students and 400 gradable items: Load time reduced from 8s to 6.8s (14.75% performance improvement)
5. Sorting controls for Student Name, Overall Grade, Assessments, and Manual Columns in grid view.
To use the grid view click the toggle grid and list view button:
Sorting options in the gradebook provide a more efficient grading experience.
Now instructors can sort the following gradebook grid view columns:
Student Name
Overall Grade
Tests and Assignments
Manual columns
Instructors can sort records in ascending or descending and remove any applied sorting. A purple highlight in the column header helps instructors identify where sorting is applied.
Any sorting applied yields a temporary change to the sort order of all columns in the gradebook grid view.
Image below: Sorting an assessment in the grid view with filters applied.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is pleased to announce its first mini-festival. The aim of the mini-fest is to bring together training sessions and workshops offered by LTEU around a particular topic with an external speaker. For this first mini-fest, we’ll be looking specifically at assessment. The mini fest will run from Monday 17th May until Friday 21st May and will be taking place online via Teams. Please book on the sessions that you wish to attend on our online booking system.
We are going to be joined by Professors Sally Brown and Kay Sambell to talk about assessment design post covid on Monday 17th May for a 2-hour workshop at 10.30am. Their paper Writing Better Assignments in the post Covid19 Era has been widely discussed across the sector since last summer:
Improving assessment and feedback processes post-pandemic: authentic approaches to improve student learning and engagement.
This workshop is designed to build on lessons learned during the complex transitions academics made last year when face-to-face on-campus assessment became impossible. A whole range of approaches were used by academics globally not only to cope with the contingency but also to streamline assessment and more fully align it with learning.
We now have an important opportunity to change assessment and feedback practices for good by boosting the authenticity of our designs to ensure they are future-fit. Drawing on their work undertaken throughout 2020, https://sally-brown.net/kay-sambell-and-sally-brown-covid-19-assessment-collection/ the facilitators of this workshop Professor Kay Sambell and Professor Sally Brown will argue that we can’t ever go back to former ways of assessment and will propose practical, manageable approaches that fully integrate assessment and feedback with learning, leading to improved outcomes and longer-term learning for students.
Professor Kay Sambell is an Independent Consultant widely known internationally for her contributions to the Assessment for Learning (AfL) movement in higher education. A 2002 National Teaching Fellow (NTF) and Principal Fellow Higher Education Academy (PFHEA), she is President of the vibrant Assessment in Higher Education (AHE) conference series, ( https://ahenetwork.org/) and Visiting Professor of Assessment for Learning at the University of Sunderland and the University of Cumbria. Kay has held personal chairs in Learning and Teaching at Northumbria University, where she co-led one of the UK Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning which specialised in AfL, and, more recently, at Edinburgh Napier University.
Professor Sally Brown is an Independent Consultant in Learning, Teaching and Assessment and Emerita Professor at Leeds Beckett University where she was, until 2010, Pro-Vice-Chancellor. She is also Visiting Professor at Edge Hill University and formerly at the Universities of Plymouth, Robert Gordon, South Wales and Liverpool John Moores and at Australian universities James Cook Central Queensland and the Sunshine Coast. She is a PFHEA, a Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) Senior Fellow and an NTF. She is widely published on learning, teaching and particularly assessment and enjoys working with institutions and teams on improving the student learning experience.
On Wednesday 16th December, the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit will be hosting the first of this year’s Academy Mini-Conferences online. The theme will be ‘Advice for Action: Promoting Good Feedback Practice’, where we will explore how to make feedback more useful and engaging for students.
The three main strands for this Mini-Conference are:
Marking group assessments
Peer assessment and feedback
Improving student learning through feedback
We are looking for proposals from staff, postgraduate teaching assistants and students to give presentations, demonstrations, workshops and discussions on their current feedback and assessment practices. Even if your proposal does not particularly fit the strands above, other relevant proposals are very welcome.
If you would like to submit a proposal to this year’s Mini-Conference, please fill in this online form before Wednesday 18th November.
You can register to attend the Mini-Conference by clicking on this link. If you have any queries, please email lteu@aber.ac.uk.
![Grid view of Gradebook]](https://wordpress.aber.ac.uk/e-learning/files/2023/09/image-19.png)
