Blackboard Learn will be unavailable for 12 hours starting Saturday, May 24, at 5:30 p.m. and ending Sunday, May 25, at 5:30 a.m. while technicians perform a significant upgrade. Instructors are advised to take this window of unavailability into account when creating new courses or administering existing ones.
This upgrade is part of Blackboard Learn’s regularly scheduled maintenance and will provide instructors and students with new and enhanced features:
- More robust notifications: When an event takes place within a Blackboard course site, students and instructors will be notified in the “Updates” and “What’s New” modules, as well as receive an optional email message. Use this feature to track new discussion board posts, set reminders for due dates, see when assignments have been graded, learn when a test has been made available and more.
- Easier group management: Instructors now may import a large number of students into groups at once, as well as identify students who do not have membership to a specific group.
- Improved testing and surveying: Updates to tests and surveys will improve the feedback and grading options available. Instructors will be able to view a detailed log of when each student accessed the test and each individual question.
- New date management tool: A new date management tool will make it easier to change due dates, availability dates, and release dates for content across an entire course.
- Enhanced accessibility features: Improved accessibility options will enable test exceptions for individual students and make course sites accessible via keyboard input.
All course content and materials will be available after the upgrade. The overall functionality of Blackboard Learn is not changing, but these new, optional features will be available to help instructors streamline their workflow while enriching their courses.
Questions regarding this upgrade may be directed to katherine.skapin@case.edu.