Blackboard bug - Hiding the Cengage Tool

There's no need to try this, but if you go to Tools or Tools Area on your Blackboard course menu and click the "Hide Link" button next to Cengage Learning MindLinks, you'll see a blank white area below the Welcome and My Courses tabs. If you've tried this, just click the back button on your browser to take you back to the Tools area.

This bug will be fixed in a future version of Blackboard, but in the meantime, you can fix this bug and hide the Cengage tool by going to the Control Panel > Customization > Tool Availability. It's best not to change anything in the Tool Availability section. All you need to do is open it. You don't need to click Submit either. Just click on Tools in your course menu again.

When you return to Tools, the Cengage tool will have magically disappeared.

How to Create Excellent Courses with Open Education Resources (OER)

What are Open Education Resources (OER)? Find out at  http://onlinelearninginsights.wordpress.com/2012/11/30/how-to-create-excellent-courses-with-open-education-resources/.

Blackboard Needs Your Help

Blackboard has three new opportunities to partner with the Blackboard User Experience team to influence future releases of Blackboard Learn. If you are interested in participating, please read further and click the registration links if you want to participate.


Student Engagement & Retention Focus Group

The Blackboard User Experience team is looking for feedback on the design and experience of tools intended to bring retention and student engagement to a teacher's attention, quickly alerting them to potential risk and allowing them to take immediate action.

If you would like to participate in this focus group, please register below.
Registration Link: https://bbuxresearch.wufoo.com/forms/recruiting-for-student-and-engagement-research /


Grading Assignments Research Activity

Are you an instructor? Blackboard is working on streamlining how you grade assignments and we need your help! We've added some new features and we'd like to spend an hour letting you use them and get your feedback.

If you are interested in participating in this research activity, please register below.
Registration Link: https://bbuxresearch.wufoo.com/forms/recruiting-for-grading-assignments-research /


Help Plus Beta

Blackboard is evolving our help (we are calling it Help Plus internally). One key change is we are opening the help system to encourage the community to share the materials they create for their school. Our goal is to build a library of best practices from the community that enhances our help.

We are looking for contributors and end users to help us test the system. Contributors are those of you that are building supplemental resources (videos, PDFs, etc) on Blackboard Learn. If you want to share your ideas and your work with the Blackboard community, we need your help.

End users are those who value help and want to help us test and perfect the system. We need your help, too!

Testing will begin the first week in December with a short introduction.

If you are interested in participating in this beta, please register below.
Registration Link: https://bbuxresearch.wufoo.com/forms/recruiting-for-help-plus/

Creative Commons Licenses

Regent University periodically publishes a video magazine for educators. This month's issue is all about Creative Commons licenses. If you're interested, take a look at http://www.regent.edu/admin/ctl/onlinetraining/centerpoint/.

Instructor Characteristics That Affect Online Student Success

There is an interesting article on the Faculty Focus blog about "Instructor Characteristics That Affect Online Student Success" that can be read at http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/instructor-characteristics-that-affect-online-student-success/.

"From these findings and the comments from participants, we identified communication/availability and feedback as the two primary characteristics that the students found important in their online courses. Students wanted frequent, timely communication and substantive feedback on their assignments. We received comments such as the following:

• “We must hear from the instructor within 24 hours!”
• “I would not think twice about withdrawing if the instructor is not available five days a week.”
• “The worst thing is waiting for a graded paper.”"

What do you think? Please complete the poll below or at http://poll.fm/3yw17.