It’s here – Release 8.0 for the Blackboard Learning System™ – Enterprise License is now available. Paul Vitagliano, a Blackboard Educational Director at Centenary College, says, "The new Blackboard Grade Center™ is a revolution in grade management, where the possibilities for marking periods, averaging and reporting are seemingly endless, and there is everything a faculty member needs for managing course grades. The interface is remarkable—easy to manipulate and intuitive for the first-time user. Say goodbye to paper grade books and offline spreadsheets!"

Release 8.0 is focused on improving an institutions's overall solution with three major components:

• Smart Grading
• Critical Thinking Tools
• Content Management for All

The goal of these three components is to achieve some fundamental goals that include:

• Increasing student engagement by using personalized experiences and active learning tools
• Improving the way we assess students across all levels of the institution
• Collaborating a secure fashion when working with digital content

Smart Grading

By communicating with clients through our Product Development Program and the Blackboard Idea Exchange™ while gathering feedback from Beta program participants, we received some loud and clear messages regarding our Gradebook. The consensus was we needed to focus on improving its navigation, flexibility and analysis capabilities.

With this as an impetus, we’ve completely redesigned the Gradebook by creating the all-new Blackboard Grade Center. Instructors wanted less clicking and more direct editing so we created one central navigation page with in-cell editing, shortcuts using the arrow keys and freezing panes. They also wanted an easier way to customize their courses. The new Grade Center makes it easier to handle exemptions from the central navigation page, add comments of any length and customize ““Smartviews” based on personal preferences. Lastly, because we heard from instructors that they wanted more help interpreting and analyzing grades, we’ve built progress reports, a grade history sheet and other ways to pull data from grades into the Grade Center.

Critical Thinking Tools

Many campuses continue to struggle with the  challenge of instilling critical thinking skills in their students. Release 8.0 first focuses on this concept with the Self & Peer Assessment feature. By leveraging this feature, students are able to review and grade their own submissions or those of their peers by following criteria entered by their instructor. Students can develop important lifelong learning skills by providing insight on where they need to improve, building constructive criticism skills and developing fundamental collaboration skills.

Blackboard Scholar™ is another critical thinking tool built into Release 8.0. Scholar is an academic resource sharing service customized for education. Instead of just saving or “bookmarking” your favorite Web sites in your browser or your online course, they can be stored in Scholar. It enables users to not only share resources with people with similar interests, but also build deeper relationships and networks to facilitate further collaboration and leverage expertise across institutions. Scholar is now built into the Blackboard Learning System for both Enterprise and Basic clients. By taking advantage of the large Blackboard network, students are able to network and collaborate – important critical skills that are beneficial to students.

And because plagiarism has always been a challenge for institutions, Blackboard SafeAssign™ is also included with Release 8.0. There is no need to install a separate Blackboard Building Block™ or Blackboard PowerLink™. SafeAssign is a plagiarism prevention service that allows you to protect the originality of work by comparing submitted papers to billions of sources. This helps ensure a fair academic environment for all of your students and can further deter plagiarism by educating students on proper attribution and citation methods.

Content Management for All

The third component of Release 8.0 lies within the Blackboard Content System™.
After consulting with administrators, librarians and copyright officers, we identified a need for greater control over the content in their repositories. They were looking for greater visibility into how that content is being used for teaching and learning. This visibility would also be helpful when enforcing copyright clearance. As a result, we enhanced metadata templates by making them easier to enter, thereby helping clearly articulate the value that good and accurate metadata provides.

We also wanted that the Blackboard Content System to be more adaptable to its various users. Major improvements have been made to workflows that address the collaborative needs of users, whether they are students working on a group project or faculty members collaborating on a department proposal. There is also more overall visibility with features like a 360° view that gives insight into content usage and Reusable Objects that leverage reuse and refined searching.

To Learn More

If you are interested in Release 8.0 and all it has to offer, please visit the What’s New section of our website.

You can find even more details in the Release 8.0 brochure. 

For information on Release 8.0 for the Blackboard Learning System - CE & Vista Licenses, please click here.