System will also be hosted on company’s servers
While students are home for Winter Break, Blackboard will be out from Dec. 17 until Dec. 21 so University Technology Services can upgrade it from the software’s eighth version, currently in use, to version 9.1.
“The faculty have been asking for an upgrade for a while and version 9.1 has been available for about a year, but we have not been in the position to take Blackboard down until now,” said Helen Epting, UTS’s Director of Public Relations and Development.
An email giving a brief overview of the changes was recently sent to all students, but the majority of the changes will be for features that students don’t use.
“Most of the changes will be things that the faculty will be able to take advantage of,” Epting said. “They’ll be doing announcements differently, there’s a new lesson plan tool, and the grade center will be updated. Students won’t interact much with the new features, but they’ll definitely benefit from the tools the faculty will have.”
The new tools will also allow faculty to “build more content” and assign textbooks directly through Blackboard instead of VIP.
The biggest change for students will be Blackboard’s appearance.
“The interface is what will be most different for students,” Epting said. “The previous one was several years old, but version 9.1 is the latest update.”
Slight layout changes, the incorporation of the USC logo and the addition of new tools are all included in the new interface.
“The look and feel is much more up-to-date, and faculty will be able to easily add more interesting content like YouTube, Flickr, and Slideshare using the new mashup tool,” said Chris Brown, director of Teaching and Technology Services. “Faculty will have options for grading using better evaluative tools like rubrics and anonymous grading. Students will be able to see the rubrics to know exactly what is required for each aspect of an assignment.”
UTS has been hosting Blackboard 9.1 training sessions since Nov. 1 and will be doing so through early January. All are welcome to these sessions, which explain the various changes to the system.
“Both faculty and students have come, and we go over and demonstrate all of the new features,” says Epting. “We go into each tool and show what exactly is different from version to version.”
Though UTS has seen a relatively successful semester with Blackboard, mostly free from the unexpected outages it had last year, officials hope this upgrade and hosting Blackboard on the company’s servers instead of USC’s will prevent system crashes. USC will transition to Blackboard’s servers by Jan. 1.
“There were some issues last spring when it wasn’t stable so we had to take it down and work on it,” says Epting. “The transition [to version 9.1] was already in the works, so we decided that it was better for Blackboard to host our site. They host 850 other schools’, it’s more efficient financially and personnel-wise and they can recover from any kind of outage much quicker because they have so many machines.”