Heidi Olson

When revising your online course is it always good to review the effectiveness of the self-assessments and quiz questions. Are certain questions constantly being answered incorrectly? Do the questions need to be rewritten or are students not prepared enough to give a thorough and complete answer. It might not be obvious as students progress through the course but it is something that you should be aware of and change during a revision, if not sooner.

In Blackboard, you are able to review statistics about how your students are accessing the site, what time of day, how often, how long, but there is no information about the results of quizzes and which questions are most often missed. One solution is to download a spreadsheet with quiz questions and answers through the gradecenter, add some calculations and evaluate.

In the GradeCenter click on the downdown arrows in the quiz column heading and select Download Results.

You are then given some choices in what kind of file you want to download. I suggest selecting the tab-delimited option so you can use it in excel where you’ll want to manipulate the data.

I would also suggest you select By Question by User since you want to make conculsions on individual questions, not users.

If your tests are set up for multiple attempts and you want to see what the progression of missed questions might be, select all attempts to see the results of every attempt the students have made. Otherwise, select Only valid attempts.

Click on the Download Results link at the bottom of the page to download a copy of the file to your computer. Once you get the file you’ll see a lot of data that you might be able to remove. The columns that you are really interested in are the Question ID Question, Answer, Possible Points, Auto Score and Manual Score.

Open your document in excel or other spreadsheet application. Now its time to enter a couple of equations so that you are able to make decisions. I suggest:

1. Total up the Possible Points column.
2. Total up the Auto Score column.
3. Then determine what the percentage between these two columns is to determine the question’s success.

When reviewing the questions with a low percentage you can also identify the incorrect answer that is most often given. This might help to determine whether you need to rewrite the question or answers, readjust your content, , or make sure concepts are more thoroughly discussed or more examples are given. In this example 60% of the students got the wrong answer (FALSE).

A widget (or badge) is a small application that runs on your desktop, on your mobile unit or that gets embedded in a website. It often will display information that is pulled from a source or from many sources that gets regularly updated. Weather widgets are very popular to see what current conditions are like where you live or for where you like to vacation. Stock Market tickers, count-downs, news, games – someone has created a visual widget for just about everything out there. According to Widgetbox.com, the most popular downloaded widget on their site is Super Mario Game.

PBS has created some “Teachers Activity Packs which look like they feature ideas for activities as well as provide links to resources.

Here’s a short video about Adding Widgets to Blackboard.

I would caution you about getting too carried away with adding widgets to your site. They might take up a lot of screen real estate, they might slow down the speed in which the site is loaded, and they might not really be that useful for your students. You might consider including a pertinent widget for a weekly topic and then taking it down. If they student found it interesting they could always go out and get it for themselves and place it on their myUA page, their google home page or other social networking site.

There are many ways that students can communicate with instructors through Blackboard. Using the discussion board for more formal discourse and sending email messages for individual questions or thought are probably the most commonly used tools. Another feature that is available is the internal Messaging system.

Students can send a message to an instructor or to individual student(s) by going to the Communication Menu and selecting Messages.

You then get a chance to review any incoming messages by clicking on the Inbox link or you can create a New Message by clicking on the New Message envelope icon.

Select the recipients and create the Message and submit.

The Blackboard Manual says, “Keep in mind that Messages cannot be sent or received outside of the users in the Course.” It’s also important to know that there is no visual que that you have a new message – you have to go to the Message area to see them.

We suggest that if you don’t want to have your students use this feature then you turn it off! Nothing is more frustrating for a student to have a message out there that goes unanswered. To turn this feature off go to the Control Panel=>Manage Tools=>Tool Availability=>then scroll down the list of available Blackboard tools and make the Messages Tool not Available.

When we began testing Bb v8 we noticed that the equation editor wasn’t working on some platforms. OIT worked with us in testing and came up with this:

Here are the platforms and browsers that we have tested and work with the equation editor:

Windows XP
IE 7 – works
Firefox 3.0.5 – works, but an equation cannot be edited once entered. It can only be deleted.

Windows Vista
IE 7 – works
Firefox 3.0.5 – works, but an equation cannot be edited once entered. It can only be deleted.

Mac 10.5.5
Safari 3.1.2 – works when the Visual Text box editor is set to unavailable. Make sure the window with the equation editor is maximized to see all available buttons. Inserting an equation is done with the “Add” button. Modifying an equation is done with the “Modify” button.

Mac 10.5.6
Safari 3.2.1 – works when the Visual Text box editor is set to unavailable. Make sure the window with the equation editor is maximized to see all available buttons. Inserting an equation is done with the “Add” button. Modifying an equation is done with the “Modify” button.

All of the above is in regard of adding an equation in the description of a content item. Viewing the equation works in all supported browsers: IE 7, Firefox 3.x, and Safari 3.x.

Mac Issues with Equation Editor and Visual Text Box Editor
Mac users have to make a choice to either use the visual text box editor or the equation editor. Currently there are no browsers that support both.

Use the equation editor
1.1 Open Safari
1.2 Log in to Bb
1.3 Go to My Blackboard tab
1.4 Click on Personal Information
1.5 Click Set Visual Text Box Editor Options
1.6 Make the Visual Text Box Editor unavailable.
1.7 Go into the course, add a content item and add an equation to the description

Use formating features of the Visual Text Box Editor
2.1 Switch to Firefox
2.2 Log in to Bb
2.3 Go back to My Blackboard tab
2.4 Click on Personal Information
2.5 Click Set Visual Text Box Editor Options
2.6 Make the Visual Text Box Editor available.
2.7 Go back to the course and format the text using the Visual Text box Editor.

This workaround does allow users to use all features of the Visual Text Box Editor, but they have to switch browsers and make the Visual text box editor available or unavailable depending on the browser they are using.

We’ve been told that some Grade item Categories may have changed when OIT upgraded Blackboard earlier this month. If you use weighted grades by category you might want to review the category descriptions to make sure they are correct.

Look here for a short list of the some new features found in the upgrade to Blackboard in Version 8. Highlights of the Discussion Board and GradeCenter, as well as features of new tools coming soon!

Included in most of the test, survey, and content areas of Blackboard is the option to use an equation editor to enter math and scientific equations without having to use html coding. Finding the right combination of browsers and operating system that works with the equationeditor has been an issue but a bit of testing different combinations has produced some successful results.

Windows Vista

• Firefox 3 – works
• IE7 – works but other features in blackboard don’t work so we suggest you use Firefox.

Windows XP

• IE6 – works
• Firefox3 – works

Mac 10.5 and 10.4

• Safari 3 – works!
• Firefox 3 – doesn’t work

News is that UAf is moving to Blackboard 8 in January – hopefully some of the issues with the equation editor will be resolved – we’ll keep you posted!

If you are using the assignment feature in Blackboard where student’s submit their assignments to you using the assignment link:

>>View/Complete Assignment: Assignment Title

You may find that the bulk download option is very helpful when managing student files. This process gives you the opportunity to download multiple assignments from multiple students at the same time. The process creates one folder on your computer and helps keeps you organized.

To use this feature, go to the Gradebook (through the Control Panel) and click on the assignment column heading.

Now click on the Item Download link

Make your selection of the assignment you wish to download. If there is no box to check by a student’s name then this tells you that they have not yet completed the assignment. When you make your selection Blackboard creates a compressed (zipped) file made up of all the assignment files plus a separate text file for their comments. If your assignment requires more than 1 file – all files that were attached to that assignment will be included in the download.

After you’ve made your selection and click OK you’ll be given a link to either click on or right-click on to get the compressed file. Save it (or open it) to our desktop so you can begin to review the assignment files.

The folder will contain the files that were attached to the assignment and a file that holds the student’s comments.

The great thing about the bulk download feature if that you can come back to it multiple times to download students files.

When a quiz or survey is set up for a single attempt for student completion, you may find that certain circumstances occur that will require you to reset the assessment so that students can complete it.

Once a student clicks to enter the quiz if they click out of it, click submit, the power goes out, they close their browser, etc. then if they try to go back in to complete the assessment they will be “locked” out.

At this point they might contact you to ask what to do to complete their assignment or you might noticed a “lock” in the gradebook.

To reset the quiz so that student’s can continue, click on the lock. You will get the Modify Grade page where you can see that no points have been assigned. Click on the View button.

Here you see the student’s attempt to take the quiz or survey. Quickly scroll down through the quiz to see if they happened to answer any of the questions before their problem occurred that closed their quiz attempt. The best place to look is under the Given Answer.

If you see no answers then click on the Clear Attempt button to clear out the quiz and reset the student’s ability to retake the quiz.

If you see that students have answered some of the questions then you’ll have to make a judgement call on if you want the student to retake the entire quiz or just the parts that they did not get a chance to answer. At this point you’ll have to manual give points to the remaining questions.

Just a reminder that we have several short tutorials on our CDE Website on various topics pertaining to using Blackboard – both for students and for instructors. If you have questions about using Blackboard that you can’t find answers for, please let me know and I’ll try to help you out!