November 2021 Blackboard News

Table with many fruitts and veggie with a blur, Caw fave on the background. Thanks giving vibes

Announcements Blackboard News

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Request your Winter and Spring Blackboard Courses

Winter and Spring 2022 Blackboard courses are available for request through SPIRE. Don’t forget that each semester you will need to request Blackboard for the courses you are teaching.

For detailed instructions, see:

Request your Winter and Spring Echo360 Courses

Echo360 course requests for Winter and Spring 2022 are available in SPIRE. Just like Blackboard, each semester you will need to request Echo360 for the courses you want to use it in. For step by step instructions, see Request Lecture Capture

Echo360 allows you to create recordings of your lectures to deliver to students. Students can access recordings to learn new content or review content to reinforce the information. The system also allows you to add interactive content and measure student engagement.

Echo360 Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) uses speech to text algorithms to create an interactive transcript for your recordings. After you do a little editing for accuracy, your students will be able to study for exams, find relevant information in recordings, and even turn on Closed Captioning for your media.

Once your Echo360 courses are ready, it’s easy to give students access to Echo360 recordings through Blackboard.

Automatically copy your Zoom cloud recordings to Echo360

You can connect your Zoom and Echo360 accounts, and have all cloud recordings copied into Echo360. If you enable this, you can even have a recurring Zoom meeting publish directly to an Echo360 course. Unlike Zoom recordings, which are kept for 120 days, Echo360 does not have a storage limit on your recordings.

Blackboard Tip of the Month: Check Originality of Student Work with Turnitin

Did you know you can use Turnitin in Blackboard to check student work for originality? As the semester begins to close, many instructors assign written projects for the class. The Turnitin activity allows students to submit their work, which will be compared with their peer’s submissions, journals, books, and websites. This can be useful to help students ensure they have cited work correctly, or as a tool to help you assess the originality of a final submission.

Planned Downtimes

There are no planned downtimes for Blackboard during November 2021.

You can check the status of Blackboard, Zoom, and other supported teaching technologies on the IT Services Status for Remote Teaching and Learning page.

Blackboard Help and Resources for Instructors

To learn more about Blackboard or to get help, you can:

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