About this release

With the Q4 2015 release, we made a series of improvements to Learn based on client feedback and our ongoing commitment to product quality, simplified workflows, and introducing new innovations to help students, instructors, and educational programs. Below you'll find a summary of what's new in this release, along with links to get more detailed information.

Related articles

Supported Technologies for Self-Hosted Systems

Browser Support for Q4 2015 Release


New features and updates

Name Description
Goal Performance Dashboard A competency-based education building block to map goals to courses within Learn. The Goal Performance Dashboard evaluates evidence of competencies individually, allowing for true measurement of knowledge.

More on Goal Performance Dashboard

Grades Journey Grades Journey integrates your institution's Student Information System with Learn. Grades Journey allows you to exchange grade information between two separate systems.

More on Grades Journey

Grades Reporting Multiple fixes have been done in this release. Visit Behind the Blackboard for more information.
PowerSchool SIS Integration As part of the innovative classroom, SIS Central two-way integration is now available for PowerSchool customers who license Blackboard Learn 9.1 October 2014 release or higher.

With this release, Blackboard's SIS Central will provide bi-directional integration between all Blackboard Learn deployment options and the PowerSchool Student Information System. The Blackboard Learn PowerSchool Integration provides a hands-free, seamless synchronization of users, classes, enrollments, assignments, and grades between Blackboard Learn and PowerSchool.

More on SIS Central

Read the full SIS Central release notes for Q4 2015

Notifications Certain clients may have experienced performance issues and outages when common notification queries were processed on their servers. Learn 9.1 Q4 2015 addresses many of these issues.
Announcement Date Restriction Default When creating an announcement, "Not Date Restricted" is now selected by default.
Escaping Special Characters When a user uploads a file to Learn and the filename contains special characters (such as / \ : ? * " < > | ), the system replaces the special character with an underscore ( _ ).
Reply-to Header This release fixes an issue with email sent from Learn. Some email clients do not use the reply-to header of emails sent by BbLearn to populate the "To:" field when the user replies to an email. As a result, some students were confused when they received email from do-not-reply@<bblearn_domain> instead of their instructor's email address.
Content Folders A hotfix is available for clients who applied the Cumulative Update 3 (CU3) for Learn 9.1 October 2014 and are experiencing difficulty accessing content folders within their system.

More on this hotfix

Browser Support Learn 9.1 now supports the Microsoft Edge browser. Some new browser releases no longer support NPAPI plugins. Without these plugins, some Learn features may not render correctly.

More on browser support

HTML5 Support The Content Editor now supports HTML5 Audio and Video playback in Chrome and Edge browsers.
WebEQ Conversion ANGEL and WebCT Vista packages will convert WebEQ match equations to WIRIS.

User interface

Some elements of the user interface have changed with this release.

Feature Description To Learn More
Discussion Threads Users can navigate from thread to thread without having to return to the main Discussions page. Administrators

Instructors

Students

Accessibility updates

Feature Description To Learn More
Discussion Boards Forum descriptions are read on the Create Thread page. This improves accessibility for users with screen reader technologies. Accessibility
Assessments When creating a hot spot question, an Image Alternate text box is now available. This improves accessibility for users. Instructors

Students

Content Editor The default heading size for all of the embedded headings has been increased so they are properly read in both the view and edit state in the Content Editor. Administrators

Instructors

Students

Bug fixes and known issues

A comprehensive list of bug fixes contained in this release can be found on Behind the Blackboard. The following table displays the top bug fixes for Learn 9.1 Q4 2015 Release.

Component Issue Description and Behind the Blackboard Article
Assessments Test completion status bar floats and covers test questions.
Grading Unable to print more than one page of a student grade report.
Notifications NullPointerException error appears when accessing the default Notification Settings in course or Organization Settings.
Course Tools Course purge fails with no data found.
Assessments Students may see an unexpected No Backtracking error when taking assessments.
Content Management Web links that start with http:// throw an error in courses.
Discussion Boards Print preview of Discussion Forum Thread Collection page is cropped.
YouTube Users are unable to embed YouTube videos using YouTube Mashup or Video Everywhere.
My Blackboard My Blackboard updates tool does not display update details.
Assessments Calculated formula questions do not go to next screen or answer box is not visible.

Security updates

Component Description
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) Ciphers Blackboard recommends using only high strength ciphers.

Learn 9.1 Q4 2015 ships with high strength ciphers configured via the bb-config.properties item:
"bbconfig.appserver.https.protocols=TLSv1,TLSv1.1,TLSv1.2"