1. Groups Management

Extra information: Blackboard Help on Groups management

The Groups in courses/communities have been updated in SP14 with a few new functionalities. The new functionalities are:

• Easily see which students are in which groups, including which students are not in any groups.
• Easily see and modify group memberships.
• Choose and manage membership for groups sets with an improved workflow.
• Import and export groups and group memberships.
• Sort columns, perform bulk actions for deleting groups, and create Grade Center smart views for one or more groups on the All Groups page.
• Manage tool availability for all groups on the All Groups page.

All Groups Page

Click the links at the top of the page to sort your view by groups, group sets, or users. All Groups is the default view and has sortable columns that contain details about all of the groups for your course. Use the View Options drop-down list to show/hide the tool availability.

After you create groups, you have the option to make tools available or unavailable. Click the check mark in a tool’s column to make it unavailable—an X appears. Click the X in a tool’s column to make it available—a check mark appears.

With the Bulk Actions drop-down list on the action bar, you can select groups for deletion or create smart views in the Grade Center for each group. A smart view is a focused look at the Grade Center. It shows only the columns that match a set of criteria, and the view is saved for continued use. When the Grade Center includes a great number of students and columns, you can use smart views to quickly find data.

All Users Page

On the All Users page, you can view which groups students belong to, search for users, add multiple users to a group, and delete users from groups.

The mouse over reveals the ‘’+Add to Group’ link

Adding multiple users to a group:

Selecteren van Group members

Whether you are creating one group or a group set, you search for and select group members from the new All Users page.

2. Course Messages Notification

Extra information:  Blackboard Help on Notification options 

Course Messages has been added to the Notifications framework. The addition of course Messages to the Notifications framework provides all users the ability to:

• View notifications for course Messages in the What’s New module, both on institutional module pages and on course module pages.
• Manage notification preferences for course Messages.

This applies to Messages in Organizations as well as Courses.

3. Achievements

Meer Information: Blackboard Help over Achievements

The Achievements tool allows instructors and course designers to designate criteria for issuing rewards to students in the form of both Badges and Certificates. Students can see which rewards they’ve earned and what is required of them to receive additional rewards, providing insight into learning progression toward defined competencies. Students are able to publish badges to the Mozilla Open Backpack, transporting evidence of their learning outside of Blackboard Learn. Instructors can easily see which students have reached learning milestones. To learn more about Open Badges and Mozilla Open Backpack, see http://www.openbadges.org/about/

Achievements has four functional areas: achievements description, reward, notification and sharing. Criteria identified in the achievement description must be met before a reward is earned. Students are notified when a reward is earned and can then share it as they choose with the world.