How Blackboard 9 is Different

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Listed below are some of the new features and changes in Blackboard 9.

    Drag-and-Drop feature to easily manage your course items

• Reposition items on a course home page (e.g., My Announcements, What’s New, To Do, which are now called Modules)
• Change the order of Navigation buttons (Course Menu items)
• Change the order of Announcements
• Change the order of questions in a test or survey

No separate Control Panel. All Control Panel options are available from the main course menu.

• Course content creation and editing tools are embedded throughout the course
• Edit Mode switch (upper right corner of a course page) allows instructor toggle between the Instructor view and the Student view of a course site
• Items that are acted upon by a user have an associated Contextual Menu (appears as a set of arrows pointing down) available throughout a course site. Clicking this icon displays options that are available to the user for that item.

Automatic hide & show of Course Menu items. Empty Course Menu Items (e.g. Course Information) are automatically made hidden to students; once content is added, the Course Menu item will be automatically made visible to students.

Grade Center replaces Gradebook.

• Scores, percentages, and other types of grading can be directly entered into the Grade Center Spreadsheet
• Grade’s history is automatically recorded. If a grade is changed, the following information is recorded in the history: the new grade, the old grade, when the change was made, and who made the changes
• Smart Views feature: Smart Views are views of the Grade Center based on a variety of student criteria. This enables Instructors to create certain views of the Grade Center—based on performance criteria for items such as Assessments or Assignments—that quickly track Students
• Average grade and minimum/maximum grade calculations are supported and can be automatically added to Grade Center as separate columns
• Creating and printing grade reports is made easy

Student Self and Peer Assessment tool has been added, which allows students to evaluate/critique their own work and their peer’s work.

Group creation is easier and more flexible.

• Instructors can create any number of groups at one time
• Different ways of grouping students: manual enroll (instructor manually assign students to groups), self-enroll (students sign up for a group), and random-enroll (randomly assignments to groups)

Digital Drop box has been replaced by the Assignments tool with the following features:

• Instructors can allow multiple submission attempts for the same assignment, and each seattempt can be graded individually
• Instructors can deploy assignments to all students individually or to groups of students, which allows assigning a single grade to all group members.
• Each file will be automatically renamed including the assignment’s name, the student’s username, and the filename the student originally submitted
• Assignments can be downloaded in a single zip file

Built-in Blog & Journal Tools for students to share thoughts on course-related topics

• Student Hompages tool has been replaced by the built-in Blog tool
• Blackboard’s Electric Blackboard tool has been replaced by the Journals tools with additional features

Course Tools and Communication Tools are now combined into a single space called Tools.

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