Information on Blackboard 9.1 Service Pack 12

The Blackboard Course Management system will be undergoing maintenance from midnight, July 26th until noon on Saturday July 27th. During this time you will be unable to connect to Blackboard. No other applications will be affected. The scheduled maintenance will fix a number of bugs with their software. The look and feel of the product will be very similar to the current version. Scroll down if you wish to see examples of the difference you will experience.

On first login to the system post-upgrade, you will receive a Welcome message asking to participate in a tour of the new features. You have the option to proceed with the tour or close the window and access your courses.

Global Navigation Menu: The entry point to My Blackboard is a new Global Navigation Menu. It's available at all times in the top right corner of the interface and provides one-click access to your Courses, Organizations, Settings, Bb Help, and the new My Blackboard tools. You can see these new tools down the left-hand side. And the numbers in red tell you if there's something new or that needs your attention – so you never have to worry about missing anything.

Content Editor: The new editor reads, writes and renders modern HTML – so those course pages you designed so carefully in Dreamweaver or offline in Word will render with great fidelity within the Blackboard Learn™ platform. When you want to make the course more interactive for students, you can easily pull in mashups from YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare. We've also made sure to keep the basic functions you need - resizing images, find/replace and simple icons in the toolbars for everyday tasks.

Retention Center replaces the Early Warning System (not to be confused with our CWIS Early Alert): Easy-to-understand views and pre-configured rules make it simple to identify at-risk students within a course. Instructors can also modify these rules to suit their individual teaching methodologies and approaches. The intuitive layout lets instructors know what to focus on. They can dig deeper into a student's performance and engagement, and then set monitoring alerts and view notification history with the student.

Quick Setup Guide: This guide walks instructors through options for changing their Course Structure, including sample content, and customizing their Course Themes, all through a simple three step process. Instructors can change the Structure and Theme of their course to match the topic being taught, or to better fit their design sensibilities. This kind of flexibility allows them to build a course that better matches the pedagogical goals of their course and improve the learning experience within that class.

Inline Assignment Grading: Annotation tools enable you to provide feedback as comments, highlights and illustrations directly on the document's inline view. It's simply better than traditional grading. Create and utilize rubrics to help score and evaluate assignments—taking time off your hands while honoring consistency.