Office of Academic Technology :: Spring Arbor University

One of the major updates to that came along with the Blackboard 9 upgrade this summer included a transformation from what used to be called the Grade Book to what is now called the Grade Center. Director of Academic Technology at Spring Arbor University and Professor Randy Meredith has been teaching workshops, giving personal training sessions and as of this afternoon led an OATmeal that focussed on the topic of the Grade Center including new navigation, new features, and simply answering questions that our instructors have as they are working with the Grade Center so closely on a daily basis themselves.

Grade Center Demo

Randy described some things he has been discovering while working with the new Grade Center, offered some of his discoveries and even got meaningful feedback from instructors regarding the tool. He pointed out that some columns become un-deletable when using “Reserved Words” in the title such as “Total”, “Weighted”, “Last”, “First”, “Name”, or “Availability” in the title of the column, but how they could still be at least hidden if need be.

He highlighted the new ability to email directly from the Grade Center which does so in a fashion by default that doesn’t show any of the other recipients when sending to multiple learners at a time unless otherwise specified to do so. Bonita Miller was also able to point out to us all something that everyone found to be a meaningful discovery. She explained that if you go to the lower right hand corner of the Grade Center, you can edit the number of rows displayed so that all the students will appear in the Grade Center view. Thanks, Bonita!

Feedback

Some instructors in attendance at this OATmeal expressed concern over students attempting to submit work via the assignment tool links only to discover that when they go to grade the content that there is no document submitted in sight even though the column indicates that the learner made an attempt to. OAT took this feedback to heart and is developing a resource for students to use in order to make sure they hit that ever-so-important submit button before they are finished searching for their document they are sending in to complete their assignment. Be sure that we will be posting this soon.

Next Steps

Many questions were answered in this OATmeal all the way up until the time we had to close. OAT would like to thank those of you who made it out for our time together. If you weren’t able to make it this week, we hope that this helps fill you in a bit on what you missed and hope that you can make it to our next OATmeal on December 1st where we will have mini-workshops to address three new tools that you might find to be helpful for you in the course you are teaching: StudyMate, Respondus, and SafeAssign. Details to come. Don’t miss it! We look forward to seeing you there.