Blackboard Learn System Upgrade

UTRGV Students, Faculty, and Staff:

Blackboard engineers will be performing a system upgrade to Blackboard Learn on Monday, August 22, 2016 at 7:00p.m. – Tuesday, August 23 at 7:00a.m. During this time, you will experience an interruption of services.

Most Exciting New Features

This upgrade will deliver better learning management system functionalities and new features. These are just a few:

• Goals 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 mastery.
• HTML 5 Support: The Content Editor now supports HTML5 Audio and Video playback in Chrome and Edge browsers.
• Announcement Email Header: The From header now includes the sender’s full name in course announcement emails.
• Thread-to-Thread Navigation in Discussion Boards: Users will be able to navigate to the next or previous thread in a discussion from the Thread Detail page without having to navigate back up to the Discussion Forum page.
• Announcement Date Restriction Default: When creating an announcement, “Not Date Restricted” is now selected by default.
• Special Characters in Assignment Titles: When a user uploads a file to Learn and the file name contains special characters (such as / \ : ? * ” < > | ), the system replaces the special character with an underscore ( _ ).
• Notifications: Several fixes have been made to Assessments, Grading and the Mobile App to improve notification performance.
• Browser Support: The Microsoft Edge browser is now supported.

Accessibility Features and Improvements

• Assessments: When creating a hot spot question, an Image Alternate Text box is now available.
• 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.
• Discussion Boards: Forum Descriptions are now read on Create Thread Page.