Release Notes for Platform Extensions

Platform Extensions 2.9 | Released April 18, 2024

TDM

Key Features:

Learner Enrollment

• You can require learners to use an access code to register for a free course, so only learners who have an access code can register for that course.

• You can allow learners to self-unenroll from free courses and set up email templates to be sent to learners and administrators when a learner unenrolls from an offering.

• Learners can unenroll from an offering on the dashboard if the offering has been configured to allow self-unenrollment. 

Admin Actions

• Administrators can search for user profiles.

• Administrators can search for a payment with a third-party transaction ID.
• You can block users from signing up to TDM based on their email domain - if the email is from a specific domain, the learner will not be allowed to register.
• You can assign custom text for modalities and prices.

• You can choose which options are enabled for filtering the catalog.

Certificates

• You can choose to allow or not allow learners to view and download certificates.

• Administrators can view data about learners' certificates and download that data in CSV format.

Various updates and bug fixes, including:

• Administrators are now able to update the Managed Enrollment email notification template.
• The date picker now works as expected when the keyboard is used to input dates.
• Courses are now visible in the catalog to users assigned to more than one node.

UAS

Key Features:

Oauth2 Authentication

New authentication source for authenticating with Oauth2 and external APIs, which allows adding SSO from applications that support standard ReST services.

Token Authentication

• Integration with Blackboard Learn username and password authentication for adding email token MFA to the login process.
• Now supports the selection of up to two email addresses.
• The UI can be customized with an external CSS file.

Routing Authentication

• Support for routing by Datasource.
• Support for redirecting to a specific location after login (new_loc parameter).

SAML IDP Secured Resource

Provides the ability to add token MFA authentication to a SAML login flow.

Various updates and bug fixes, including:

• Logging now includes IP address.
• Public and private SAML key configurations are no longer required to be base64 encoded.

Grades Journey | Blackboard Learn v3900.91.0

Release to Test/Stage: Tuesday, 9 April 2024 | Release to Production: Thursday, 2 May 2024

Key Features:

Extraction by Term

• Select the term you want to filter by. The extract will only include the courses that are associated with that term.
   

• If you fill in an effective date and a stop date, the extract will only include courses associated with that term if the current date is within the two dates. (The dates can be left blank and the extraction will not be limited by date.)

Inclusion of Valid Grades

• You can provide a list of grades that will be considered valid grades.
   

• Valid grades should be letter grades, not numbers.
• If a grade value is not valid, it is not included in the extract. When an invalid grade is encountered, an email notification is triggered.
• Records that are excluded from the extract because they are invalid are added to a file that is sent as an attachment to the email notification.

Email Notification for Invalid Grades

• An email notification is triggered when an extract encounters invalid grades.
   

• The email contains an attached file that includes a detailed list of records with invalid grades.
• The email is sent to instructors and administrators that are specified in the Grades Journey admin settings.
  • Instructors will receive notifications only from those courses they are assigned to.
  • Administrators will receive notifications from all courses that have invalid grades.

Grade Update Notification

• You can set up a static email notification to be sent to designated recipients on a CRON-configured schedule.
   

• This email can, for example, be used as a reminder to instructors to update grades at a specific time.

Grade Center Read-Only for Ultra Courses

• Locking can be enabled for Ultra courses to set the grade center to Read-Only after the due date of a given grade column.

• Locking for Ultra courses requires that the role ID "RO_GJ_INSTRUCTOR" be present in your Blackboard Learn environment. If it is not, you will receive an error message when you try to enable the locking feature. To have the role added to your environment, please submit a ticket.
• For Ultra courses, you can only use the After Grade Column Due Date option. You must enter the name of the grade column on which locking will be based in the Lock Grade Column Name box under Enhanced Read-Only Features (no other Enhanced Read-Only Features will apply to Ultra courses).

• After the due date for that grade column in a course has passed, the course will be set to complete and the roles for users in the course will be changed. Instructors will no longer be able to make changes to the grades.

Platform Extensions | Released February 1, 2024

TDM 2.8

Key Features:

User Interface
You can set a banner and a logo for each theme so a user's role determines which banner and logo they see.
 

Learner Profiles

• A system admin can enable learner profiles from the TDM v2 configuration screen in Platform Extensions Manager.

Before user profiles are enabled, a configuration setting must be updated. Please submit a ticket to have this done before you enable learner profiles.

• The learner can click on their username and profile picture in the navigation column to access their profile.
• The learner can edit their profile if an admin has updated the JSON schema on the sign-up form to allow the editing. For assistance with this task, please submit a ticket.
• You can configure a notification email that will be sent to learners each time a profile update is saved.
   

Payments
You can view the third-party Transaction ID for a PayPal transaction in its payment history along with the TDM Transaction ID.

Account Creation

• You can restrict users who can sign up for TDM based on their email address. Only users with email from one or more allowed domains (such as anthology.com) will be able to register. Please submit a ticket for assistance with this task.
• You can set up automatic enrollment in a specific course after an account has been created from the User Workflow Manager v2 screen in Platform Extensions Manager.
   

Various bug fixes and updates, including:

The Sign In, Sign Up, and Sign Out links have been moved to the navigation panel.
 

The "Constrain Proportions" option now works properly for images on the homepage.

Reporting Framework v2 and Grades Journey v2

Reporting Framework v2 and Grades Journey v2 have been released and will now be visible under Platform Extensions on the admin panel in Blackboard Learn. If you are currently using v1 of these products and would like to migrate to v2, please contact your account representative.

Platform Extensions | Released December 19, 2023

TDM v2.7

Key Features:

Offering Information Screen

• Offering rows are color-coded based on course dates and availability:
  • Red - past course
  • Blue - future course
  • Green - active course
  • Yellow - unavailable course
• Offering rows show the course dates when you select More Information. 

Learner Enrollment
You can add the Max Enrollments to the offering. When you do, the number of seats remaining in the course will be displayed on the course details panel in the catalog.
 

Automatic ID Generation
You can enable automatic ID generation for course, offering, and program IDs in the TDM Settings area on the General Settings tab.
 

Program Enrollment
You can set enrollment and availability dates for programs. 
 

Institutional Hierarchy

• A system admin can enable institutional hierarchy from the TDM configuration screen under Platform Extensions on the Admin Panel. 
   

• You can enable a setting allowing catalog visibility outside nodes in the TDM Settings area on the General Settings tab. This allows users within nodes to see offerings that are not assigned to nodes.
   

• You can use a node picker to add a node to each offering.
   

Learner Progress
A system admin can enable or disable the progress tool for TDM.

Sign Up Form
You can define the JSON configuration for the TDM sign up form to allow a dropdown of roles that map to Learn roles. When a learner creates an account, they can choose a role and their account will be created with that role. You can submit a ticket for help with that process. 

Various bug fixes and updates, including:

• The progress tool operator was updated to be "greater than or equal to."
• The total possible score was added to the Gradebook Item dropdown in the Assign Certificate panel.
• The Homepage catalog links now click through in all languages.

Platform Extensions| Released November 2, 2023

Grade Export and Grades Journey

The feature known as "Grades Journey Standard," frequently referred to as "Grades Journey," has been renamed. Now known as "Grade Export," its functionalities and capabilities remain the same. It is a back-end feature that allows grades to be exported to anywhere required by an institution, such as an SFTP server in a CSV file or similar flat file format. Administrators can enable and configure this feature following instructions featured in the admin guides; should they need more guidance on enablement, the grade export implementation service is available at an extra cost. Likewise, "Grades Journey Premium" has been renamed "Grades Journey." From November 2023, Grades Journey refers only to the upsell offering Blackboard Learn extension.

TDM v2.6.1

Key Features:

• Offering Creation
  When creating an offering, you no longer have to close the offering and reopen it to add a certificate or progress to the offering. Instead, you can click Next, the offering is created, and you are directed to the portion of the screen where you can add a certificate or progress.
  

Various bug fixes and updates.

Platform Extensions| Released October 19, 2023

Extended Course Management v2

Extended Course Management v2 (ECM) is a Blackboard Learn extension that allows users to perform select administrative tasks in Blackboard Learn courses. ECM can be used to give instructors and other non-administrative users the ability to merge and separate courses (for example, these permissions could be given to an instructional designer role for a department or to instructors for their own courses). When courses are merged, instructors only have to manage and update content in the parent course.

Reporting Framework v2

Reporting Framework v2 is a Blackboard Learn Extension that works as a data reporting tool. The extension provides the ability for administrators to configure reports for use by Blackboard Learn users or schedule reports for delivery to other storage systems.

The Reporting Framework v2 Extension allows you to

• enhance your LMS instance with access to all data collected from faculty and learner engagement in Blackboard Learn.
• extract data from Blackboard Learn through reports that can be emailed or made available to selected users.
• subscribe to standard reports.
• create custom reports against raw Blackboard Learn data.
• create custom reports against other data sources like BB data.
• schedule and deliver reports based on parameters established by your institution.

TDM v2.6

Key Features:

• Course Creation
  When choosing a course template, you will no longer have to choose a course that has been marked as a template in Blackboard Learn. When you select Course template search, you will see the advanced course search in the Blackboard Learn environment. The courses you choose will be saved in the Associate Course Templates box in a comma-separated list of IDs.
  
• Payments
  • You can order your payment search results by column.
    
  • You can filter by date within the payment search results.
    
  • You can download the payment search results as a CSV file.
  • You can copy and paste the data from an individual transaction.
    
  • Learners can view and copy transaction data from their courses.
    
  • You can set up a payment information message to show to learners on the payment page.
     
• User Interface
  The HTML editor used throughout the extension now has a source mode that allows direct HTML editing.
  
• Certificates
  Certificate authenticity allows learners to generate an authenticity link that they can share that will display their certificate along with the generated date and the validity date. Each certificate generates a unique ID.
  
  The learner will have the option in settings to allow some private data to be shown, which will allow the learner's name to be displayed along with the certificate dates.
  
• Homepage
  • Categories can be shown as a carousel on the homepage; when you click on one of the category tiles, it will take you to a view of the catalog already filtered to that category.
    
  • A new page with subpages can be added to the navigation column under the catalog link, containing whatever information you'd like.
    
• Navigation
  You can create a link to courses with a specific category or tag within the catalog that can be shared with others.
  

Various bug fixes and updates, including:

• On the homepage, videos now display properly.
• The help icon is working on the Certificates and Progress tabs.
• Help text has been updated on the Administrator screens.
• Courses can no longer be saved without a name when adding additional languages.

TDM 2.5 | Released August 31, 2023

Key Features

• User Interface
  • Improved UI Features in Administrator Screens, including
    • Various tables (such as Instructor Management and Certificate Management) can be sorted by column.
      
    • A list of offerings available for each course has been added to the Course Management screen.
      
    • Search capability is available for Management screens.
      
  • Catalog Tile and Search Improvements
    • Searching the catalog will search the name, categories, instructor name, and ID.
    • Course Tiles show the Name, Summary, and Instructor Profile Photos in a cleaner display.
      
• Course media settings
  Offering media settings will now be inherited from the parent course unless they are overwritten.
• Learner Enrollment
  • An email template for notifying learners that they have been enrolled in a managed enrollment course has been added.
    
  • Offering managers can specify email addresses to send notifications that learners have enrolled in a managed enrollment offering.
    
  • An email template for notifying specified people that learners have enrolled in a managed enrollment offering has been added.
• Payment
  Administrators can access payment history to search for payments.
  

Various bug fixes and updates, including:

• An issue with dates displaying incorrectly has been resolved.
• A security patch.
• The role picker works with over 100 roles with paginated data.
• Text changes.
• An update that resulted in changes to the TDM URL.

TDM 2.4 | Released July 18, 2023

Key Features

• Course creation
  A Create Offering button has been added to the Create Course screen to streamline the Course and Offering creation workflow.
• Learner Enrollment
  The Offering Manager can create Denied Access Enrollment offerings that will allow learners to enroll in an offering but not access it until an administrator or instructor approves them.
• Learner Sign In
  Learners with an account can Sign In from the Sign Up peek panel.
• Payment Codes
  Payment codes can be created to apply to specific courses or specific users.
• User Interface
  An overlay appears when a user's session has expired.

Various bug fixes, including

• The Homepage header is now responsive.
• The User is taken to the Sign In screen after Sign Up validation.

These improvements impact administrators, instructors, and learners.

TDM 2.3 | Released June 6, 2023

Key Features

• Homepage
  • A toggle allows you to turn the homepage on or off.
  • You can add a heading to the Introduction and Footer sections of the homepage.
  • You can add an unlimited number of links to the Footer section of the homepage.
  • You can configure the homepage in multiple languages.
• Payment codes (initial release)
  • Administrators can create and update payment codes.
  • Learners can pay for courses with payment codes.
• Progress tool updates
  • The progress tool contains more explanatory text and a link to help documentation.
  • Each gradable item shows the maximum number of points available.
• Institutional hierarchy (first release)
  • TDM recognizes whether courses and users are in a node.
  • Users who are in a node can only see courses in the same node.
  • You can select an institutional node template when creating courses and offerings.
• Payment Gateway
  • TouchNet has been added as a Payment Service Provider.
  • Cybersource has been added as a Payment Service Provider.

Various bug fixes, including

• Achieved certificates no longer appear on the Obtainable certificates tab.
• Sign up now works correctly in the Firefox browser.

These improvements impact administrators, instructors, and learners.

TDM 2.2 | Released April 18, 2023

Key Features

• Progress Tool
  • Instructors can use the new progress tool to define progress in a Blackboard Learn course or directly through an Offering based on grade columns. Grade columns are assigned a percentage value and a minimum grade required for that grade value to count toward progress.
    
    For example, this course will show as 50% complete when a student has earned at least 5 points on Test 1, 50% complete when the student has earned at least 5 points on Test 2, and 100% complete when both minimum requirements have been met.
    
  • Learners can view progress in their courses on the dashboard, in a third tab next to Courses and Certificates.
    
• The Payment Gateway
  • Future payment service providers and codes will be allowed.
  • Learner payment flow has been improved with a simplified one-page layout that is fully localized and mobile- and tablet-friendly.
  • Administrative configuration under Platform Extensions Manager has been improved so it is easier to enable a payment service provider in the Payment Gateway.
• Enrollment
  The Learner workflow for enrolling in or purchasing Offerings when Learners are not signed in to TDM has been simplified and now resembles that from TDM v.1.
  • Learners will see an "Enroll Now" or "Buy Now" button whether or not they are signed in to TDM. If Learners click on the button, they are taken through a workflow for either signing in if they have an account or creating an account if they do not.
  • Once they have completed the sign up or sign in process, Learners are returned to the same peek panel where they can now select the "Enroll Now" or "Buy Now" button to enroll in or purchase the course.
• Reporting
  A Reporting tab has been added to the Administration area that contains a link to launch the TDM Reports Menu.
  

Various bug fixes, including

• Upcoming courses are no longer displayed on the Active Courses tab on the Dashboard.
• Management roles can no longer add the same language more than once to TDM items.
• Management roles can no longer add TDM items with duplicate IDs.
• All dates are consistent with Blackboard Learn instances.

These improvements impact administrators, instructors, and learners.

TDM 2.1 | Released February 21, 2023

Key Features:

• Session times should now last one full hour based on launching TDM and moving from extension to extension.
• A certificate can now be assigned from the Edit Offering screen once an Offering has been created.
• A "Continuous Course" filter has been added to the filter options available when searching the catalog.

Various bug fixes, including:

• A Terms and Conditions link can now be defined on the sign up form.
• The homepage settings can store more text and images.
• Translation and wording fixes have been made.

These improvements impact administrators, instructors, and learners.