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Blackboard Tip: Adding a Survey

By adding a survey, faculty can  gain feedback from students on any subject. Survey questions are anonymous, so students share exact feelings and give honest feedback. An example of a uses for surveys is seeking suggestions for course improvement. Following steps to add a survey

·         From the c Control Panel section, Click “Course Tools”, Click “Test, Surveys, and Pools.”

·         Click Surveys.

·         From within the survey manager page click “Build Survey“

·         Enter  survey Name,   Description, Instructions.  Click Submit

·         On the Survey Canvas page, mouse over Create Question and select a question for example “Multiple Choice”

·         enter the Question Text for your first survey question.

·         Enter the answers in the text box. Blackboard default answer selection is 4 you can, select the number of answers from the drop down menu or remove any answer choice by clicking the remove button near the choice .  

·         Click Submit  to add the question.

·         To edit any question mouse over the cheveron near the question and select edit

·         After adding all survey question click Ok.

·         To deploy your survey , click on the content area you want the survey to be available in for example surveys , select evaluation , create survey

·         Select Survey and click submit

·         Check yes near make the link availble and any desired setting

·         Click Submit

·         To check surveys statistics, click evalution – Grade Center- click the cheveron near the survey column and select Attempts Statistics, you can download the results by clicking download results.

Video:  https://www.azwestern.edu/learning_services/instruction/distance_education/faculty_resources/helpdesk/survey.html

Faculty Blackboard Resources Page:

https://www.azwestern.edu/learning_services/instruction/distance_education/faculty_resources/helpdesk/

Blackboard Tip: Pasting text from Word

Pasting text directly from word document into blackboard creates formatting problems, may make the content unreadable because of the hidden formatting code included when using the copy/paste feature from Word.  We recommend that you use a notepad (PC) and Notepad) or TextEdit (Mac) as a solution to remove html code.  Using Notepad or TextEdit removes the bad html code from text.

Example of html code pasted from word

Following are the steps to avoid  html codes.

Step 1:  In MS Word, select the text and copy

Step 2:  Open Notepad (PC:  Click Start > All Programs> Accessories > Notepad) and paste text. This action will remove text formatting

Step 3:  In Notepad, select text; from the menu select edit copy.

Step 4: Go to the course content area or Discussion Board post in Blackboard and paste the text in.

Step 5. Format your text using Blackboard’s Text Box Editor Tools.

One Day!

On February 15, Arizona Western College Political Science Department hosted a roundtable political discussion titled “Palestinians and Israel: Is conflict inevitable? How about peace?” Speakers included Mizba Abedi, (Ph.D), Ed Schubert, Karl Josef “Murad”Luttinger (Ph.D) and Kyle Hawkey. The round table gave an opportunity to AWC faculty, students and staff to learn more about the sixty years old conflict in the Middle between the Israelis and the Palestinians. With hope in peace, Kyle Hawkey shared a virual slide show from his visit to Israel and Palestinian territories . Enjoy!

Peer Review Through the Discussion Board

Peer Review Through the Discussion Board


Overview From Blackboard:

A common learning tool in classrooms is providing feedback to other Students on their work. Students prepare an essay, lab report, or presentation and share it with the class. Other Students are asked to comment on the work and offer criticisms for improvement. This process helps the Student improve their Assignment, but is even more valuable to the Students that review the work. Reviewing the work of another Student enforces classroom learning and helps the reviewer practice important communication skills and critical thinking.

The Discussion Board is the perfect place in a Course for peer review. Each Student may start a thread and include their work in the initial post. Other Students then review the work, assign a rating to the initial post, and include comments in a response. As users respond, the feedback expands as users reinforce and build on points made by other Students.

Users can respond to a post using a 5-star rating system. To enable this feature, select Allow members to rate posts when creating the Forum.

Rating a Discussion Board Post


Open a thread and view the posts. Each post has an Overall Rating field with five stars. The stars show the overall rating that the post has received from users. Click on the Rate this Post drop down list and select a rating from 0 to 5 stars. The rating is now included in the Overall Rating and the individual rating appears in the Rate this Post field. A user may not rate the same post more than once..



Video: http://www.azwestern.edu/learning_services/instruction/distance_education/faculty_resources/helpdesk/peerreview.html

Blackboard Tip: Adding a User to Blackboard

Following  steps for  adding a user  to Blackboard

From the control panel


-    Expand the option for “Users and Groups.”
-    Click "Users" link.

  

-    Click  “Enroll User”

          

-    In the “Username” field, add the user names of the students or instructors you wish to enroll. If you  are
enrolling multiple users, separate the usernames with a comma. Select   the appropriate “Role” of either Student or Instructor.  Keep the default  for "Enrollment Availability"  Click “Submit”.

If you are unsure of username, click the “Browse” button to search for a particular  username , you can search by username, last name, first name or email.Select the Username click “Submit” – Click “Submit “

If you’d like a student dummy account  to  be created for you to be able to view your work as a student  send an email to jaime.nolasco@azwestern.edu



Note:  You can always turn the  edit mode off to see the work  from a student perspective.


Video:

Blackboard 9 and known Issues

 Have you worked with blackboard 9 lately and got upset that things are not working right! As a Faculty member, I get bothered when a function does not work; sometimes I need to look for available training or reference but most of the time things do not work because of a known issue, (a simplified term for a bug) in blackboard that I did not know about.  For example, an instructor creates a new announcement and checks the box “Send Email to all users even those that choose not to receive Announcement notifications through email” but an email is not sent to students.(Recently Fixed). This is one of the known issues that blackboard is aware of. Another instructor gets frustrated after losing 25 minutes of his precious time sitting in front of his desk trying to reorder forums in the discussion board but the forums are not displayed in the reordered pattern when the discussion board page is refreshed.
Blackboard has a list of known issues obviously not listed on the homepage, but found in the Blackboard knowledge base. Following is a list of known issues to keep in mind when working with blackboard 9.

•     Any time display dates are used be sure to select both a display-after date and a display-until date. Do not use both availability dates and adaptive release.

•    A difference between number of students listed in Blackboard and the number in Webadvisor. (The students need to activate their accounts in order to be listed in Blackboard).

•   Bug: Switching the Visual (Text box) Editor off or on will cause the page to refresh and all work on that page is lost. This is very important to avoid when typing text in Bb.

• Issues with Internet Explorer 8 and Blackboard: Using Internet Explorer 8 with Blackboard will cause problems for students attempting to submit tests or use the file upload feature. Instructors are not able to see the right scroll bar in the grade center.  To avoid issues it is suggested to advise students to use Mozilla Firefox http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ie.html or change to the “compatibility mode” in IE8 (Tools > Compatibility View Settings > Check 'Display all websites in Compatibility View' > Close.

• In IE 8 changing the number of rows in the grade center will cause the grade center to suddenly close.

• Announcements notification by email is not working : Announcements notification by email is now working. Students enrolled in class receives an email from the Blackboard Administrator titled " New Announcement Available in course: .."  informing them  that a new  announcement was added to the course

• When copied to new shells text generated in the Text Box Editor does not keep the formatting: You would need to reformat the text (Known issue, pending Blackboard solution.)

• Reported by Dr. Balch: Blackboard does not import tests created using at least one textbook manufactures test management system. Sometimes BB reported an error sometimes tests just disappeared into the ether. The work-around is to save the test in WebCT format and import as a Pool.  

• If you have a quiz bank in RTF format that you would like to convert to blackboard , following is a link to a quiz generator  http://www.csi.edu/blackboard/bbquiz/      where you can past the questions and edit them to be  in a certain format per documentation  , download zip file and upload to blackboard through the pool.  

• Notification modules are not synchronized to real time. (Known issue, pending Blackboard solution.)

• Instructors using Safari may get an obscure error message when trying to update a weighted total in the grade center. The error might be something like blackboard.persist.PersistenceException: Unable to generate id. The provided key value is invalid: blackboard.platform.gradebook2.GradingPeriod - - {2} the bug occurs if there is no grading period in the course. You can fix the problem by creating an empty grading period. Go to the Grade Center and click on "Manage"->"Grading Periods", then "Create Grading Period"; give it a name (perhaps "term") and click "Submit"." If you are using MAC and have Firefox, try using Firefox to add the weighted total.

• Some Instructors may see a broken link on the homepage, this happen if the Module page is not available in tools availability. To make module page or any other tool available click “Customization”-“Tool Availability” and check the box near the tool needed. You can change the entry page through “Customizations”-“style”- “Select Course Entry Point

As with every learning management system , bugs are fixed and other unknown issues may occur. The above list is updated regularly if you would like to report any known issue please let us know.