July 2022 Blackboard News

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Request Your Summer and Fall 2022 Blackboard Courses

Summer and Fall 2022 Blackboard course requests are open Don’t forget that each semester you will need to request Blackboard for the courses you are teaching.

For detailed instructions, see:

Request your Summer and Fall Echo360 courses

Echo360 course requests for Summer and Fall 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 Has a New Theme

Blackboard  has migrated to a new theme. The new theme updates the look and feel of your course site. It also includes responsive design features which will allow your students to access your course comfortably on mobile browsers.

The functionality of your Blackboard course, including materials you’ve adde, such as quizzes and readings, remains the same.

If you have any questions, please reach out to us!

Blackboard Tip of the Month: Edit the Dates of Multiple Activities

Did you know you can edit the dates of multiple activities all from the same page in Blackboard? This can be useful if you’re copying a previous course, or if you need to make date changes while you are teaching the course. You can even use this to adjust the availability of activities.

Planned downtimes

There are no planned downtimes for Blackboard in May 2022.

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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