Release Notes for Learn SaaS

Learn SaaS release 3900.67.0

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3900.67.0
Release to Test/Stage: Tuesday, 9 May 2023 | Release to Production: Thursday, 1 June 2023
Original Experience, Ultra Experience
Original Course View, Ultra Course View

For full feature details please review the corresponding notes for the Learn 3900.67.0 version included below on this page. Details can also be found Behind the Blackboard.

Latest release: 3900.67.0-rel.9+1b5c39c to Test/Stage servers to take place on 23 May 2023.

For more information on updates and bug fixes, please visit Behind the Blackboard.

 

Learn SaaS release 3900.65.0

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3900.65.0
Release to Test/Stage: Tuesday, 11 April 2023 | Release to Production: Thursday, 4 May 2023
Original Experience, Ultra Experience
Original Course View, Ultra Course View

For full feature details please review the corresponding notes for the Learn 3900.65.0 version included below on this page. Details can also be found Behind the Blackboard.

Latest release: 3900.65.0-rel.17+fc3b8f5 to Production servers to take place on 18 May 2023.

For more information on updates and bug fixes, please visit Behind the Blackboard.

 

June 2023 – 3900.67 Release

The June 2023 - 3900.67 release is robust with features in six areas:

• Assessment and grading;
• Richer course and content;
• Data and analytics;
• Communication and social engagement;
• Integration, extension, and management; and
• Course upgrading

These improvements impact instructors, students, and administrators. Some features do require administrative action.

Features with this icon are controlled by a client facing feature flag:

Instructors:

• Add Exemptions for Anonymous Assessments
• Add Exceptions from Gradebook Grid View and Student Overview page
• ‘Base calculation on points earned out of total graded points’ support for Custom Calculations
• Upload questions from a file to tests
• Support for anonymous grading of tests
• Journals Grades & Participation list filters

Instructors and students:

• Course Links improvements
• Announcements in the top navigation
• Course Term display logic improvements

Students:

• Original Course View: Improved Assignment Submission page

All users:

• Additional Level of Content Nesting
• Prevent passwords exposed in data breaches

Administrators:

• Progress tracking management
• Bulk Conversion options
• Prevent renaming of items when moved during a copy, import, and/or conversion
• Preserve “Open in New Window” behavior for Flickr Mashups as Web Links
• Managed privilege to view System Roles

Original Course View: Improved Assignment Submission page – 3900.67

Blackboard Learn SaaS, Blackboard Learn 9.1
Ultra Experience, Original Experience
Original Course View
Impact: Students

Students submitting an Assignment in Original Course View have several possible actions. They can upload files, author a submission, and attach a note to their instructor. Previously, these actions could be confusing for students. The option to add comments always displayed. The option to author a submission required selecting a button that was easy to miss.

We redesigned the Assignment submission page to be less confusing and easier for students to use.

Students have three distinct actions they can take. Each section can be opened independently. Students can open more than one. The page will retain added content when a student closes a section.

• Create Submission
• Upload Files
• Add Comments

All Assignment information has been grouped together:

• Due date
• Points possible
• Grading rubric
• Group membership and update statuses
• SafeAssign disclosure

Image 1. The new student Assignment submission page has three sections: instructions, submission, and assignment information

Image 2. The “Create Submission” section opened

Image 3. The “Upload Files” section opened

For administrators: This feature is available for all Original courses. There are no configurations needed.

Return to June 2023 – 3900.67 Release description

Managed privilege to view System Roles – 3900.67

Blackboard Learn SaaS, Blackboard Learn 9.1
Ultra Experience, Original Experience
Ultra Course View, Original Course View
Impact: Administrators, Developers

Developers create applications that expand the functionality of Blackboard Learn. Some of these apps integrate using REST APIs. Administrators manage the privileges for integrated apps. As a best practice, an integration should only have the minimum privileges necessary to function.

In the past, if an integration needed to read System Role information, the integration user had to be set as a full System Administrator. Now administrators can configure an integration user with fewer privileges and still grant access to view System Role information.

In the System Role privileges manager, administrators can now grant the privilege, Administrator Panel (Users) > System Roles. No System Roles have this privilege by default. An Administrator must always grant the privilege to any System Role. It isn’t possible to grant this privilege to a Course Role.

For administrators: This feature is available for all Learn environments. There are no configurations needed at the administrator level. To improve security, admins should reduce privileges for a REST application if System Administrator privileges were granted previously as a workaround.

Return to June 2023 – 3900.67 Release description

May 2023 – 3900.65 Release

The May 2023 - 3900.65 release is robust with features in five areas:

• Assessment and grading;
• Richer course and content;
• Data and analytics;
• Integration, extension, and management; and
• Course upgrading

These improvements impact instructors, students, and administrators. Some features do require administrative action.

Instructors:

• Grading attempt selector improvements
• Question Banks - Reuse Questions option
• Add Exemptions via the gradebook grid view
• Rubrics improvements
• Send Messages from the Submission page
• Remove category assignment requirement when editing LTI items via the gradebook
• Hotspot question zoom in / out
• Drag and drop desktop folders to upload to the Course Content page
• Instructor’s Notes on Student Overview
• Improved conversion for Flickr Mashups
• Improved conversion for Discussion Forums and Threads

Instructors and students:

• Prevent backtracking in tests with page breaks
• Control where Web Links open

All users:

• Symbol font removed in Original Course View
• Personal information restricted in passwords

Administrators:

• Option to turn off “How am I doing?” report for students
• Login As Permissions Improvements
• Reduced email notifications when purging data sources
• REST APIs to read Goals alignments
• Toggle records between enabled and disabled states

Symbol font removed in Original Course View – 3900.65

Blackboard Learn SaaS, Learn 9.1
Ultra Experience, Original Experience
Original Course View
Impact: All Users

Unicode is a standard encoding system that allows popular fonts to support characters across various languages. In the past, specialized mapped fonts were used, which replaced one character for another. However, both the author and viewer had to have the exact same font installed on their device, making communication difficult.

In the Original Course View Content Editor, the Symbol  font is an example of a mapped font for Greek. Some browsers and operating systems no longer support the Symbol  font. This can result in students seeing Latin characters when authoring and instructors seeing Greek ones when reading. This has caused confusion for instructors trying to grade student work.

To avoid this confusion, we removed the Symbol  font from the Content Editor in Original Course View. Instead, users can choose other common fonts that support Greek characters. To type in Greek, add the Greek language and keyboard layout to your device's operation settings. This feature is supported in Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android.

Existing content formatted to use the Symbol  font will remain in that font if the browser supports it.

For administrators: This change is for all Original courses. There are no configurations needed.

Return to May 2023 – 3900.65 Release description

Option to turn off “How Am I Doing?” Report for Students– 3900.65

Blackboard Learn SaaS
Ultra Experience
Ultra Course View, Original Course View
Impact: Students, Instructors, Administrators

The “How am I Doing” report allows students to see how they perform in comparison to the class.

Certain institutions may prohibit the sharing of this information with students. To support institutions' preferences, administrators can now control the visibility of this report.

Image 1. An administrator toggles the “How Am I Doing?” report for students to “Off”

When report availability is set to "Off" the following changes occur for students:

• The pie chart icon in Grades tab in base navigation no longer appears.
• Prior notifications from the “How Am I Doing?”  report are removed in the Activity Stream. No new notifications related to this report are sent.
• The “My grades and activity” section in the Activity Stream notifications settings panel is removed for students.

Image 2. When the “How am I doing?” report is available to students, the pie chart icon in the Grades tab of the base navigation is visible

Image 3. When “How am I doing?” is set to “Off,” the pie chart icon in the Grades tab of the base navigation is removed

Image 4. When the report is "On,” students receive Activity Stream notifications related to the “How am I doing?” report; students can access links to the report. When the report is not available, these options do not appear to students.

When the report is turned off, instructors and administrators also experience changes. The option to notify students related to the "How Am I Doing" report no longer display. Instructors will not be able to notify students based on these course alerts in the Course Activity report or Gradebook.

Administrators will no longer see options related to the report in the Notification Settings page.

• No Recent Activity
• Grade Low or at Risk
• Grade Dropped
• Low Class Activity
• Grade Increased
• Grade in Top 10%
• Class Activity in Top 10%
• Grade Below Threshold

Key considerations:

• It may take up to 15 minutes to hide all stream notifications after an administrator turns the report off.
• If an admin turns off the report and then turns it back on, prior data and notifications will reappear after several minutes.

For administrators: Administrators can find this setting on the Ultra Experience Management page in the Administrator Panel. The default setting is "on" to maintain consistency with existing behavior. This feature requires a cloud service update, which administrators can expect within a week of the 3900.65 release (on or before May 11).

Return to May 2023 – 3900.65 Release description

REST APIs to read Goals alignments – 3900.65

Blackboard Learn SaaS, Learn 9.1
Ultra Experience, Original Experience
Ultra Course View, Original Course View
Impact: Administrators

Learn courses offer a unique opportunity to see how institutional objectives align with each other and how the objectives relate to internal or external goals. This information can be invaluable to educators and administrators who wish to measure the effectiveness of their curriculum and ensure that their goals are being met.

To make it even easier for institutions to access this important data, we are pleased to announce the release of our new Goal Alignments Public API. This API includes a set of GET endpoints that allow users to retrieve goal alignments data for their courses.

The endpoints included in this API cover two main use cases:

• retrieving all goal alignments from a course
• retrieving all alignments for a specific goal across all courses

By providing access to this data in a simple and easy-to-use format, we are empowering educators and administrators to make data-driven decisions. This helps to improve the overall effectiveness of our clients' curriculum.

For administrators: The REST integration user must have the privileges “Course/Organization > Goals Alignments, View” and “Administrator Panel (Tools and Utilities) > Goals” to make use of the new endpoints.

Return to May 2023 – 3900.65 Release description

Toggle records between enabled and disabled states – 3900.65

Blackboard Learn SaaS, Learn 9.1
Ultra Experience, Original Experience
Ultra Course View, Original Course View
Impact: Administrators

Various record types have different states. For example, an enrollment can be unavailable. This allows instructors to continue to grade student work and submit a final grade even when the student can no longer access the course. An enrollment can also be set to disabled. In this state, the enrollment is locked and hidden from users. A student information system (SIS) might disable an enrollment when a student drops the course.

Previously, administrators had to rely on data integration processes to change a record’s enablement state. This could require processing a file through the integration framework.

Now administrators can toggle the enablement state in the administrator panel. They can modify user, course, organization, and enrollment records. This allows administrators to temporarily re-enable a course or user to access information. It can also allow a help desk representative to grant access to a user waiting on an institutional data process.

When a user first enables or disables a record in the user interface, they must accept a disclaimer. It must only be accepted one time. Manual record changes are captured in the system logs.

Image 1. Administrator manually disables a course

Image 2. Administrator re-enables an enrollment record

Return to May 2023 – 3900.65 Release description