Features of Blackboard

Enrolling and Tracking Students

• Current Enrollment Information. Student accounts are created and enrolled in your Blackboard course. The student information in your course is always current; it comes directly from Banner and is updated once a day. The current student information populates the student areas of your course.
• Roster. Blackboard provides a class roster that is populated with current student information, as described above. As an instructor, you have the option of making the roster public to all students enrolled in the class.
• Course Statistics. The Course Statistics feature allows you to see when students have logged on to the course, how much time was spent, and what parts of the course were viewed. This may be used early on to make sure everyone is "on board."

Posting Course Materials and Content

• Announcements. You can post announcements quickly and easily using any computer with Internet access.
• Course Materials. Blackboard provides an easy and fairly flexible way to post your course materials. You can even post all of your course materials ahead of time, then make them "visible" as you cover the material in class.
• Access to your course materials is controlled: only students enrolled in the course may view them. Copyrighted materials may be securely posted in Blackboard.
• Since courses may be archived and recycled, you can save time by reusing some or all of your course materials from semester to semester without rebuilding your course.
• A variety of materials can be posted: Word processing documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, video and audio files, etc. You can link to external files or Web sites. Even entire Web sites, with the link structure intact, can be uploaded into Blackboard.
• Assignments may be posted in a variety of formats. Like other types of content, assignments may be posted ahead of time and then made "visible" as you are ready to release them.

Communication and Collaboration

• Email. Blackboard allows you to send email to your students' official UM email address. You can send email to all students or select single students. Optionally, you can make this feature available to students so that they may communicate with one another. Since the email feature requires students to select the recipient's name from a list, email addresses are kept confidential.
• Discussion Board. While Blackboard's email feature provides good one-way communication it is not a good way to conduct multi-way communication. The Discussion Boards provide a good means of "public" communication, allowing instructors and students to post and reply to messages. Documents can be attached to Discussion Board posts. Discussion forums can be used for assignments, FAQ's, collaborative work, peer critique of work, etc.
• Virtual Classroom. The Virtual Classroom provides real-time chat and whiteboard utilities. This is useful for holding class meetings, virtual office hours and for students to meet and collaborate. The Virtual Classroom provides features for the instructor to control who has the floor and to take and respond to private questions. The whiteboard allows you to draw, post slides and link to Web pages.
• Group Pages. Blackboard facilitates online study groups or project groups by giving students a "private" area to work collaboratively. Group pages include an area to share files, a private Discussion Board and a private Virtual Classroom.

Assessment

• Online Gradebook. The Online Gradebook allows you to post grades securely. Each student may access his or her grades by logging in to Blackboard. Since a student's grades are associated with his or her Blackboard account, you don't have to come up with a special scheme for posting grades! The Online Gradebook allows you to weight grades, categorize grades and view the information in a variety of ways. You can export the Gradebook to Excel if you want to conduct a more advanced statistical analysis of the information.
• Quizzes and Question Pools. Blackboard's Assessment Manager allows you to create online quizzes. The quizzes provide the student with immediate grading information and feedback, and are automatically entered into the Online Gradebook. As the instructor, you can view individual students' scores and view a detailed analysis of all scores. While quizzes are very time-consuming to create, they may be reused and moved into other course via question pools. Additionally, textbook publishers sometimes provide quizzes and question pools that can be imported into your course.
• Surveys. Surveys allow you to collect information anonymously. Both surveys and quizzes allow you, as the instructor, to view a detailed analysis of the responses.
• Feedback. Feedback can, and should, be provided in a number of ways. Instructors can email students individually using the email feature. Instructors can use the Digital Dropbox, described below, to return papers to students with your comments.

File Exchange

• The Digital Dropbox is a file storage area that may also be used to exchange files with students. The Digital Dropbox allows you to Add or Send files. Adding files to your Dropbox stores them so that only you have access to them. Instructors may Send a file to selected students or all students in the class. When a student Sends a file, the file goes only to the instructor. The Digital Dropbox is often used to distribute files to students and for students to submit assignments. The Digital Dropbox is good for file exchange between instructors and students, but not between students.
• The Discussion Board, if set up to allow file attachments, enables instructors and students to attach a file to a post. This is a way for students to post files publicly.
• The Group Pages include a file exchange area, similar to the Digital Dropbox, that may be accessed by all members of a group.
• Files can be exchanged using the email function.