Blackboard 7.3 has arrived!

Welcome to Blackboard 7.3. The Virginia Community College System (VCCS) has successfully implemented the Blackboard 7.3 Enterprise version. After 9:00 a.m. on Monday, November 5, faculty and staff will be able to access Blackboard 7.3 by going to the temporary URL - http://bb7.vccs.edu/.


What you need to know

1. You will continue to use Blackboard 6 with your students for the rest of Fall semester by using the URL learn.vccs.edu or by clicking on my NOVA on the NOVA website, as you currently do.
2. November 5 after 9:00 a.m., Blackboard 7.3 is available to only faculty and staff at the temporary URL - http://bb7.vccs.edu/
3. Your username and password are the same for both Blackboard 6 and Blackboard 7.3; they have not changed.
4. December 20, 2007, students will have access to Blackboard 7.3 through My NOVA and the URL http://learn.vccs.edu/.
5. December 20, 2007, the official URL for Blackboard 7.3 will become learn.vccs.edu, the temporary URL bb7.vcc.edu will disappear, and Blackboard 6 will be accessed through bb6.vccs.edu.
6. Spring 2007 and Summer 2007 courses have been migrated to the new Blackboard 7.3. Fall 2007 courses will be migrated to the new system after December 20.
7. After December 20, 2007, courses that were set up as organizations will be migrated to Blackboard 7.3.
8. After December 20, 2007, to the Content System will be restored.
9. The opening page of Blackboard will not have all the modules on it that it had before. NOVA is in the process restoring all the modules by Thanksgiving.
10. The only building block available is Wimba. During the Spring 2008 semester, the VCCS will be working on the following building blocks: Learning Objects (this includes blogs and wikis), Classtop, iTunes U, and SafeAssign. More to come later on these!

Important Note: By mid-November, the NOVA Blackboard administrator will have created course shells for all Spring 2008 courses. These shells will be empty and will not contain any copied content. You will now have the choice of adding new content, or exporting/importing content from your previous Blackboard courses into the course shells. Instructions for how to do this will be provided at that time.

What you need to do

1. Check your courses that were migrated to the new servers to see some of the new features in Blackboard 7.3. The Spring 2007 and Summer 2007 courses only were migrated to the new system. There are no student enrollments in these courses, so there are no grades or work.
2. Identify any issues involving the imported courses and either enter comments in this blog or email Cathy Simpson at TAC.
3. Become familiar with the Instructor Manual located in Help box on your course Control Panel.
4. Check the TAC site next week to register for face-to-face training to take place this month on your campus. The training sessions will focus on the new features. This initial training is for those currently using Blackboard.
5. After mid-November, export/import Fall 2007 or Spring 2007 Blackboard courses into your Spring 2008 course shell or begin to add new content to build your SP 2008 Blackboard courses.
6. Check this blog regularly for updates that will be posted here.

Issues that have already been identified

1. There are some known problems with migrated Wimba content. The VCCS is working on this.
2. Links you had to the Content System will not work until after December 20.
3. The Control Panel can be slow to load; Blackboard is working on this.

Some of the new Blackboard features

You will find several new instructional features in Blackboard 7.3, including Adaptive Release, which provides instructors the ability to create custom learning paths through course content and activities, and the Performance Dashboard, a tool for tracking student progress across all course activities. Blackboard Forums (discussion boards) have been completely redesigned to include options for grading, moderation, and peer review, and instructors planning to use discussions are encouraged to familiarize themselves with the new forum design prior to the start of the term. Other enhancements include:

• The ability to import test questions created outside of Blackboard
• The ability to import and export individual tests
• Visual Text Box Editor (VTBE) support for MAC users
• Second language support for eight languages
• Tutorial movies designed to help users learn Blackboard
• Windows Vista and Office 2007 compatible