Learn the Terms

Assessments: "Assessments" covers both assignments and tests.

Content Market: You can discover and add content and tools from external sources. Access valuable learning materials from Blackboard's partner publishers, such as Macmillan or Cengage.

Conversation: If you enable class conversations when you create content, students can discuss the content with you and their classmates. They can ask for help, share sources, or answer questions others have. As the conversation develops, it appears only with the relevant content. Conversations don't appear on the discussions page.

You can enable conversations for these content items:

• Documents
• Assignments
• Group assignments
• Tests
• Group tests
• Offline submissions
• Links to teaching tools

More on conversations

Course states:

• Open: You can open a course when you're ready for students to participate.

• Private: You can make a course private while you add or experiment with content, and then open it to students when you're ready. Students see private courses in their course lists, but they can't access them. Private courses appear with a gray instructor image and a diagonal line.

  You can't make a course private during an active term. Contact your administrator about a course's settings.

• Complete: You can choose to set your course to Complete when the course has ended, but you can no longer make changes to it. Students can access the content, but they can't participate in the course any longer. For example, they can't reply to discussions or submit assignments. You can return the course to Open or Private as you want. However, if a course has an end date, and the end date passes, then students can't access the course any longer. So, if you complete a course and open it again after the end date, students can't access it. Complete applies to the Ultra Course View only.
• Hide: You can choose to hide a course from your course list to organize your view.

Document: A basic content type that allows you to combine a variety of materials to view together, such as text, multimedia, and attachments.

Global pages: In the left panel, you have access to core features in the list where your name appears. When you select any link from the list, you see a global view across all your courses. Access the activity stream that captures all the action in your courses and the grades page that shows all your grading tasks organized by course.

Gradebook: Access all the coursework that is specific to the course you're in. The gradebook is populated with students when they're enrolled in your course. You can grade coursework, manage items, and post grades.

Layer: All of your course content appears in the main part of the page. When you open a piece of content, it slides out in a layer on top of the Course Content page. Close layers to go back to a previous spot in your course.

Panel: When you create or make settings, a panel opens. In the panel, you can choose the content type you want to add or select settings.

Parallel grading: You can have specific users in your courses grade sets of assessment submissions. Graders can't see other graders' grades, feedback, annotations on student files, and rubrics. They grade in parallel and provide provisional grades. The default grading roles include instructors, graders, and teaching assistants. The instructor role is the default final grader or reconciler. The reconciler reviews the provisional grades and determines the final grades that students see.

Question analysis: Question analysis provides statistics on overall performance, assessment quality, and individual questions. This data helps you recognize questions that might be poor discriminators of student performance. Question analysis is for assessments with questions. 

Question bank: You can import question banks for use in assessments in your courses. Instructors typically use banks to create a database of questions they can reuse in multiple assessments. Original Course View question pools appear as Ultra question banks after conversion.

Question pool: When you create a test you can use question pools to be sure each student receives a different version of the test.