Letter Grades in the Blackboard Grade Center

Blackboard can display grades as numbers, percentages, text, and letters according to a customizable grading schema.

Internally, Blackboard stores all grades in the Grade Center as numbers, but they can be displayed as letters and entered as letters if desired.

The way a column displays grades is decided by the primary and secondary display options, which can be set using the “Edit Column Information” settings from the column heading drop-down under Grade Center > Full Grade Center in your Blackboard course.

Students can see only the primary display schema.  The secondary one is for the instructor’s reference only.

The way Blackboard maps letters to numbers is fully controllable by the instructor using the Manage > Grading Schemas option in the Grade Center.

There you will find a schema called “Letter” that you can edit.

When you edit the schema you will see the percentage ranges for each letter, and you will see what numeric percentage value Blackboard will use to calculate if you enter a letter for a grade.

You can make any adjustments necessary.


When you enter grades into cells in the Grade Center, you enter values according to the column’s primary display schema.  So if it’s set to score or percentage, you must enter a number.  If it’s set to letter, you must enter a letter.

As a general rule, we recommend entering grades as numbers since that way you will always be able to understand the calculations that result from them.

If you prefer displaying grades as letters, you can always change the primary display to letters later when you are done entering the grades, for the students to see.

We hope this helps explain letter grades in Blackboard. For more information on Grading Schemas in Blackboard, please see the Blackboard documentation here.

How to Access Survey Results in Blackboard

You can access the Survey results by using the drop-down in the header row of the column that represents the survey in the Gradebook.

Instructions:

Find the column for the Survey in Grade Center > Full Grade Center.  Click the arrow that appears when you move your mouse over the column name and choose Attempts Statistics from the drop-down menu.

      

       

You will now see the results of your survey on a page.

Note:  Surveys in Blackboard are always anonymous, meaning that you cannot attribute specific answers to specific students.  If you need to create a non-anonymous survey in Blackboard, instructions are here.

We hope this information is helpful.

How to Add a Librarian to your Blackboard Course

On the Northeastern Blackboard instance, it is now possible to add a librarian to your course to assist with review or editing of your course material.

Librarians may add, edit, and delete course material in your course, but may not remove students or other users from your course, and do not have access to view or edit student grades.

Here's how to add a Librarian to your course/organization:

1.  Go into your course/org site in Blackboard and at the lower left click Users and Groups > Users.

2.  Click Enroll User > Find Users to Enroll.

3.  Click the “Browse” button and search for the person by Last Name or Email.  

If you have trouble finding the person, make sure you are not searching by username.  If a person has a drop in the course, you will not be able to enroll them.  In that case, contact help@neu.edu.


4.  Select "Librarian" from the Role drop-down and click the Submit button.

That's it.  The person you enrolled now has access to your course material.  You may see a list of who is enrolled in the course by clicking Users and Groups > Users > GO

How to Post a Cloud File Link in Blackboard from OneDrive

The best way make a large file available to your students in Blackboard is to upload it to a cloud service such as OneDrive and then post a link to the file in your course.

Here's how:

1.  In your browser, go to Northeastern's OneDrive instance at Northeastern's OneDrive service is available at northeastern-my.sharepoint.com.  Create a folder there and upload the file you want to host into the folder.

2.  Go to the Northeastern Blackboard site at blackboard.neu.edu and navigate to your course.

3.  Make sure "Edit Mode" is toggled to ON at the upper right

4.  Navigate to the Content Area in which you want to post the file link (e.g. Course Material)

5.  From the "Build Content" menu, select "Upload Cloud Content"

6.  Type a name for your link and select the "OneDrive for Business" cloud service

7.   Select "Link from Cloud"

8.  Click "Browse" to locate your file within OneDrive.  

Proceed to browse to the file you want to post and click the file name.

If this is the first time you have logged into OneDrive, you will need to proceed through the authentication process using your myNEU account, which will return you to step 6.

9.  Click the "Submit" button.  A link to the file will be posted into your Blackboard course

Students can now click your link to view or download the file.

Here is a video showing the process for linking to a video file in OneDrive: http://screencast.com/t/GmX4rPzbcGNg

We hope this is a helpful guide.  Please let us know if you have any questions.

ATS@neu.edu

Send Email to Multiple Courses at Once, and Post Content to Multiple Courses at Once in Blackboard

Instructors:

Do you want to post content to several of your course sections at once in Blackboard?

Would you like to send an email message to several of your sections at once?

You can by using the "Multiple Courses" box on the Courses tab in Blackboard.

From there, you can send email to multiple sections, post content or links to multiple sections, even create assignments in several sections simultaneously.

We hope this tip is useful to you.  Please let us know if you have any questions about it.

ATS@neu.edu


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