Release Notes for Learn SaaS

Learn SaaS release 3900.62.0

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3900.62.0
Release to Test/Stage: Tuesday, 7 March 2023 | Release to Production: Thursday, 6 April 2023
Original Experience, Ultra Experience
Original Course View, Ultra Course View

For full feature details please review the corresponding notes for the Learn 3900.62.0 version included below on this page. Details can also be found on Behind the Blackboard.

Latest release: 3900.62.0-rel.16+82edc15 to Test/Stage servers to take place on 21 March 2023.

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

Learn SaaS release 3900.60.0

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3900.60.0
Release to Test/Stage: Tuesday, 7 February 2023 | Release to Production: Thursday, 2 March 2023
Original Experience, Ultra Experience
Original Course View, Ultra Course View

For full feature details please review the corresponding notes for the Learn 3900.60.0 version included below on this page. Details can also be found on Behind the Blackboard.

Latest release: 3900.60.0-rel.41+9d324a9 to Production servers to take place on 23 March 2023.

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

April 2023 – 3900.62 Release

The April 2023 - 3900.62 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:

• Multiple Grading Schemas: Add, Edit, Copy
• Submission page sorting controls
• Gradable Items View usability improvements
• Discussion navigation improvements
• Deactivated students no longer show in student progress reports
• New access points to Student Overview
• Course Activity Report accessibility improvements

Instructors and students:

• Hotspot question: Circle Shape and Usability Improvements
• Bb Annotate: Enhanced comments
• Cloud document “Refresh” button improvement

All users:

• Course Content Title Search
• Primary Instructor improvements
• Course Upgrading: Remove HTML for plain text fields
• Updated Text for Copies and Imports

Administrators:

• Sort Courses and Organizations by Course View
• View Enrollment Data Source Key
• LTI Tool Content: Standardize default icons
• Configure decimal and group separators in locale

Bb Annotate: Enhanced comments – 3900.62

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

It is important for instructors to provide rich and meaningful feedback for students. We have improved formatting and editing options for instructors.

• Instructors can now include richer formatting in comments. This includes font colors, bold, underline, and hyperlinks.
• Instructors can now edit already placed comments.

For administrators:This feature might not be available at the same time the release takes place. The deployment information will be updated on status.blackboard.com.

Return to April 2023 – 3900.62 Release description

Sort Courses and Organizations by Course View – 3900.62

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

Administrators often search for courses and organizations in the administrator panel. The search results show the course or organization view as Ultra, Original, Undecided, or Preview. Now administrators can sort search results on this column. Sorting helps administrators better find the desired courses or organizations. Sorting may also help administrators better understand adoption of the Ultra Course View.

A course designated as Undecided is in the Original Course View, but an instructor may change it to Ultra Course View. A course designated as Preview uses the Ultra Course View, but an instructor can revert to Original Course View.

Image 1. Course search results sorted by Course View

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

Return to April 2023 – 3900.62 Release description

View Enrollment Data Source Keys – 3900.62

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

Data source keys allow administrators to segment data sets. They help to limit changes to records except by an appropriate data authority. To change some aspects of a record, you must know the data source key. In the past, administrators could view the data source key for user, course, organization, and term records. Data source keys for course and organizations enrollments were not displayed in the administrator panel.

If an administrator needed to update aspects of an enrollment record, they had to know the data source key because it was not displayed. Now the courses and organizations enrollments list pages, display the data source key for each enrollment. Administrators can also sort by the Data Source Key column.

Image 1. Listed enrollments for a course, displaying the data source key

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

Return to April 2023 – 3900.62 Release description

March 2023 – 3900.60 Release

The March 2023 - 3900.60 release is robust with features in six areas:

• Assessment and grading;
• Data and analytics;
• Mobile app;
• Integration, extension, and management;
• Communication and social engagement; and
• Course upgrading.

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

Instructors:

• Improved attempt switching when grading student submissions with multiple attempts
• Sorting Controls on the Anonymous Submissions Page
• Sorting on Overall Grade in the Gradebook Student List View
• Course Activity Report Table Enhancements
• Unsupported Course Cartridge and ePack Features Removed
• Support for concurrent course copies
• Preserve empty content areas
• Preserve font families
• Reschedule announcements

Instructors and students:

• LTI Tool Content Icons on Calendar
• Manage Roster
• Discussions – deactivate post activity

All users:

• PDF version of the SafeAssign Originality Report
• Improvements to the user profile
• Password age, re-use, and expiration policies
• Blackboard Assist (K12 availability)

Administrators:

• Administrator Login As Tool: Permissions Extended
• Rest APIs to read Rubrics associations
• Security: Registration of all domains required
• Default menu settings no longer apply to new courses and organizations using the Ultra view

PDF version of the SafeAssign Originality Report – 3900.60

Blackboard Learn SaaS, Managed and Self-Hosting
Ultra Experience, Original Experience
Ultra Course View, Original Course View
Impact: All users

The SafeAssign Originality Report is a valuable teaching and learning tool. Instructors use the report to ensure students express original thoughts and cite sources. Some instructors allow students to view the report. This is helpful for teaching students how to cite their work.

In the past, users could download the report as PDF. However, users could not open the sources from the PDF.

Now, users can open matched sources from the PDF. We also made some usability improvements to the PDF, such as text alignment and font adjustments. To better support peak usage, we made infrastructure improvements.

Image 1. Improved PDF version of the SafeAssign Originality Report

For administrators: Managed and Self-Hosting clients must upgrade to the newest version of the SafeAssign Building Block for these improvements.

Return to March 2023 – 3900.60 Release description

Data & Analytics

Course Activity Report Table Enhancements – 3900.60

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

The course activity page helps instructors understand students' performance. With this information, instructors can:

• Identify struggling or high performing students based on their grade, hours in course, or days of inactivity.
• Message students who have a low grade and/or have not accessed the course recently.
• Receive alerts when a student has not accessed their course in a while or if a student's grade has dropped.

With this update, we have made the following improvements:

• New Table - Updated to be more consistent with other features. Those who use progress tracking will find the feel of the new table should be familiar. The new table makes it easier to select and message students.
• New Days of Inactivity Column - the number of days since a student last accessed your course. Instructors can use this information to identify students that might be falling behind.
• Access Student Overview - click or tap a student's name to see their grades, progress, and activity over the weeks. Instructors can use the Student Overview to get a full picture of a student's performance and engagement in a course.
• More Student Information. Accommodations, name pronunciation, and pronouns are now visible. Instructors can use this information when drafting messages to students.

Image 1. Course Activity Report - new table capabilities and metrics

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

Return to March 2023 – 3900.60 Release description

Integration, Extension, and Management

Administrator Login As Tool: Permissions Extended – 3900.60

Blackboard Learn SaaS
Ultra Experience, Original Experience
Impact: Administrators and users with permissions

End user support is critical for system administrators and other support staff in varying roles. Administrators can now enable the Login As feature for roles other than the full administrator role. This ensures that institutions can enable additional support personnel without giving them full administrative privileges.

When using Login As, your activity will be logged against the impersonated user, and may result in false positives for activity that could impact institutional or external reporting.

Image 1. Manage Login As privileges in the Administrator Panel

For administrators: To enable the Login As entitlement, access System Roles > Privileges. Mark the two privileges for Login As. Select Permit Privileges in the Privileges dropdown.

Return to March 2023 – 3900.60 Release description

REST APIs to read Rubrics associations – 3900.60

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

Providing access to Rubric associations within our REST API framework offers many benefits:

• additional administrative control for assessments
• flexibility for external third-party integrations
• supports instructor-student communication about performance expectations

In this release we are glad to make available a new Rubrics Associations API. This public API includes a set of GET endpoints. This helps to inform users about existing rubric associations in a course:

• Rubrics associations
• Rubrics associations by rubrics ID
• Rubrics associations by associations ID

For administrators: The REST integration user must have the entitlement “course.rubrics.VIEW” to make use of the new endpoints.

Return to March 2023 – 3900.60 Release description

Password age, re-use, and expiration policies – 3900.60

Blackboard Learn SaaS
Ultra Experience, Original Experience
Impact: All users who are allowed to reset their passwords in Learn

Most institutions use an identity provider (e.g. Azure Active Directory) to manage and authenticate users. There are cases when administrators create users in Learn. These users may set their own passwords in Learn. In support of security requirements for passwords, users may be prompted to:

• Change their passwords after a certain number of days have elapsed since their last password change. After expiry, users can log in with their old password, but are prompted to change it immediately before continuing.
• Wait a span of time between password changes. When a user tries to change a password before a certain span of time, they are informed that they cannot change the password. We recommend contacting the helpdesk in this case.
• Avoid re-using previous passwords.

Image 1. A user is prompted create a new password after password expiration

Image 2. A user is informed when a password cannot be changed because of the password Minimum Age Policy Violation

Image 3. A user is informed that previous passwords may not be reused

Image 4. An administrator configures the Password Age and History policies

If necessary, an administrator can require users to change their passwords to meet password policies updates instead of waiting for an automatic expiry. The “Expire Password” option appears in the Administrator Panel on Users page. Select one or multiple users at a time. Full System Administrators can use this new feature by default. Administrators may grant this privilege to other roles if desired: “Administrator Panel (Users) > Users > Edit > Expire Password”. If an administrator chooses to expire a user’s password and the Minimum Password Age Policy is turned on, users will not have to wait to change their password.

Image 5. An administrator expires users’ passwords

Finally, for security measures, passwords are no longer stored in archive packages.

Image 6. An administrator downloads archive package

Return to March 2023 – 3900.60 Release description

Unsupported Course Cartridge and ePack Features Removed – 3900.60

Blackboard Learn SaaS, Blackboard Learn 9.1
Original Experience
Original Course View
Impact: Instructors

In the past for Original Course View, there were two older methods for adding licensed publisher content. These are no longer supported:

• Course Cartridges, a server-based method to download licensed publisher content using one-time keys
• ePack licensed content importing when converting WebCT courses

While we have not supported these for years, users still see options to add Course Cartridges download keys. APIs for ePack conversion are still part of the course import process. In this release, we have removed these. Instructors and admins will no longer see options to enter a Course Cartridge download key.

Image 1. An instructor viewing the “Import Course Cartridge” page in the Original Course View Control Panel—this option will be removed in 3900.60

There are no changes for existing content. Course Cartridge materials that required ongoing license validation have not worked for years. Course Cartridge materials that became standard Learn items—students do not have to enter license keys to access them the first time—will continue to work.

This change is unrelated to other methods to import content or access licensed publisher materials. These other methods are not impacted by this change:

• Partner Cloud
• Importing or exporting a Learn course package
• Importing or exporting a Common Cartridge (an exchange format standard from 1EdTech, formerly IMS Global)
• Course auto-archive

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

Return to March 2023 – 3900.60 Release description

Security: Registration of all domains required– 3900.60

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

Various methods of verifying users help to make the Blackboard Learn application more secure. One method is to confirm all requests come from authorized domains. Administrators manage this in the Administrator Panel > Hostname Configuration.

In the past, requests from some parts of the application would work even if the requester domain was not registered. In this release, this will no longer be allowed. This improves the security of Blackboard Learn.

Image 1. The hostname configuration page allows administrators to register all domains used to access the Learn application

For administrators: If your institution created additional domains for your Learn environment, you must register them all. This applies to both primary application domains and alternate domains for serving content. For example, an administrator at Monument University created the domains learn.monumentuni.edu for users to access and learn-content.monumentuni.edu to securely serve content. Both must be registered.

Return to March 2023 – 3900.60 Release description

Blackboard Assist (K12 availability) – 3900.60

Blackboard Learn SaaS
Ultra Experience, Original Experience
Blackboard App
Impact: All users

Assist offers learners one central hub within Blackboard Learn to find and access the services they need to flourish. In the past, Blackboard Assist was not available to clients with K12 licenses. From March 2, 2023, K12 clients will also have the chance to enable Assist.

Enable Blackboard Assist within Blackboard Learn to: 

• Give learners one place to find vital support services. The prominent placement of Blackboard Assist in Blackboard Learn helps make learners increasingly aware of all connected support resources.
• Get learners to take advantage of available services. Blackboard Assist is available around-the-clock from the desktop and Blackboard mobile app. This means that learners can access these support resources whenever and wherever they need them. Featuring services this way provides an additional means to capture your learners’ attention. 
• Gain access to Ally File Transformer: The Blackboard Ally File Transformer helps learners to personalize their learning experience. It can convert files into alternative formats that better fit their needs, devices, and learning preferences.

For administrators: Assist must be enabled for use. Learn more: https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Administrator/SaaS/Tools_Management/Blackboard_Assist

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