Blackboard 9 maintenance successful
12 Apr 2013
The maintenance undertaken from 4 to 7 April has resulted in new functionality for the Blackboard system.
You may already have noticed some improvements, for example to the HTML editor and the new navigation menu on the top right of the screen.
New functionality includes:
- “Fill in the Multiple Blank” and “Fill in the Blank” questions now support evaluation matching by “Contains” and “Regular Expressions”, which provides much greater flexibility for matching possible correct answers to a range of user responses;
- a change to the Maths equation editor in Blackboard to reduce its reliance on Java;
- the discussion forum tool has had a visual overhaul – a number of user options have moved and discussion threads now appear as one single long list of postings rather than as a collapsed thread structure, so users can see the entire thread on one page;
- the discussion forum settings now provide an option to force participants to create a message thread before they can see other contributions in the forum;
- the My Blackboard tool set features a revised interface for navigating between enrolled courses and organisations – this replaces the “My Places” link and provides a central navigation hub.
eLearning is working on revised documentation, and aims to complete this by 31 May.
We are also optimistic that this maintenance work will have fixed the problem experienced during the January exams when some student answers were not being saved during exams. We will be carrying out further testing in-house prior to the next exam period in order to be satisfied that the problem is resolved.
Further information
Please contact your eLearning Team at: