January 2021 Release

Educator Insights Blackboard Learn SaaS Release 3900.4.0

Happy New Year! Welcome back to Educator Insights for 2021.

With this month's release students, instructors, and administrators will see changes everywhere they encounter the rich text editor in the Ultra Course View. There is a new session data capture feature that will make life easier for Administrators. Also, a reminder for Admins, December 31, 2020 marked the end of support for Blackboard SOAP Web Services.

This post is designed to provide an educator lens over relevant new features and updates provided by Release 3900.4.0 of Blackboard Learn SaaS. These new features are available on production as of 14 January 2021. Full release notes https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Administrator/SaaS/Release_

Administrators and Learning and Teaching Support Staff in an Institution will find this information useful as they work on change management with their end-users.

NEW ULTRA COURSE VIEW FEATURES

Rich text editor improvements

Impact: Students, Instructors, Administrators

This release brings a boost to the formatting tools in the Ultra Course View's rich text editor.

Additional formatting tools support the creation of engaging text content, through the use of font colors, font sizes, and font styles.

The new secondary formatting bar provides a better user experience, particularly on smaller screens. As you can see below, when the space on your screen gets smaller the formatting bar condenses formatting options under drop-down menus.

Support panel session data

Impact: Administrators

Logging tickets has long been a struggle for administrators. There isn’t an easy way for administrators to capture what the user was doing at the time the issue occurred. This often leads to a lot of back and forth between our clients and support as we attempt to gather the necessary information needed to investigate a bug further. We understand how frustrating that process can be.

With this release, users will now be able to capture their most recent session data (last 30 actions the user has taken) and send it to their administrators to attach in support cases. This feature will be available in the Support Panel as well as anywhere the “Oops! Your name is not on the list.” message can occur.

End of SOAP Web Services capabilities

Impact: Administrators

Blackboard SOAP Web Services were officially deprecated on January 4, 2019 (see the original announcement). 
As of December 31, 2020, Blackboard Learn SOAP Web Services are no longer supported, as they have reached the end of life per our deprecation policy. See the full release notes for further detail.

For information on API updates and Maintenance items for this release check out the full release notes.