Creating a Non-anonymous Survey in Blackboard

Surveys in Blackboard are anonymous, which means the instructor cannot see which specific student answered a particular way in the survey results.

If you need to create a survey for which you need to attribute specific answers to specific students (a non-anonymous survey), the way to do it in Blackboard is to create a Test and call it a "survey".

To create a non-anonymous survey (Test):

1. Select Course Tools > Tests, Surveys, and Pools from the course management control panel.

2. Select Tests, then Build Test

3. Provide a name, description and student instructions for the non-anonymous survey.  We suggest including the word "Survey" in the name so students will know this is not a test.

4. Next, from the Question Settings page set the Default point value to 0 because this is a survey, not a test, so the questions so have no numeric value.

5. For this example survey, we created one question as an Opinion Scale / Likert question:

6. Since the non-anonymous survey is technically created as a Test, you must select a "correct" answer.  In this example, we select the "Not Applicable" answer as the correct answer.  Since this is a survey, there really is no correct answer, so it does not matter which answer you designate as correct.

7. To deploy the non anonymous survey, set the Make Link Available option to "Yes" and in the "Show test results and feedback to students" section, uncheck the "score per question" checkbox and set only the "Submitted" check box as shown to ensure that the student does not see which answer you designated as the "correct" answer you selected when creating the test:

8. If the survey is already deployed, you can Edit the test options by clicking the drop-down menu to the right of the test link:

9. Here is a video of the entire process.

Creating Smart Views in Blackboard

Blackboard supports Grade Center smart views to limit the number of rows or columns shown in your grade center.

1.  To show specific columns in a grade center view, first go to Grade Center > Full Grade Center in your Blackboard course, and click the Manage > Column Organization option.  Move all grade center columns from the default location: "Shown in All Grade Center Views" to the section below "Not in a Grading Period", being careful to maintain your column order.

   

2. Next, verify your columns are categorized, if not use this to associate each column with a category:

3. Now we are ready to create the smart view as shown (Manage > Smart Views)

4. To limit the number of columns in your grade center smart view, choose to show one category of columns, select "Category and Status View items by their category and status" as shown, select the category from the Categories drop down and select the users to display or set to all users:

5. You may also limit the number of rows displayed based on criteria such as 1. Group affiliation, 2. Performance on an assessment, 3. individual students, or 4. a custom set of criteria as shown:

   

6. Setting the smart view as a favorite will show it as a Grade Center submenu option:

7.  Your new Smart View will display under "Grade Center" at the lower left of your course site.  Clicking the Smart View will display only the Columns in the Grade Center that match the Smart View criteria.

How to schedule due date reminders

You may edit your notification settings to tell Blackboard that you want to receive due date
reminder email messages

Edit your notification settings:

1. Login to Blackboard. 
2. At the very top-right of the page, click your name.
   
3. Click "Settings", then "Edit Notification Settings" from the drop-down.
   

1. On the Edit Notification Settings page, click Edit General Settings
   
   

You will see the General Settings page.

Under General Settings: Courses

Set "Send Due Date Reminders" to Yes and set the number of days before the due date to send the
reminder.  You will now receive a reminder message for each due date event for which you have 
elected to receive notifications (refer to the "How to Edit Notification Settings" page)

How to Schedule Notification Emails

You may edit your notification settings to tell Blackboard that you want to receive email 
notifications as either a daily digest or as individual messages

Edit your notification settings:

1. Login to Blackboard. 
2. At the very top-right of the page, click your name.
   
3. Click "Settings", then "Edit Notification Settings" from the drop-down.
   

1. On the Edit Notification Settings page, click Edit General Settings
   
   

You will see the General Settings page.

Under General Settings: Courses, 

Select Individual Messages to receive a message for each event for which you have elected to
receive notifications (refer to the "How to Edit Notification Settings" page)

Or Select Daily Email Digest to receive a daily digest of all notifications from either your courses
or your organizations (communities).

Blackboard Online Collaboration

There are several options for online collaborate in Blackboard.  Here are a few of them.

Blackboard Collaborate is a real-time Webex-like live conferencing system built into Blackboard. The system can handle hundreds of students at once with multiple moderators (instructors). Features include live video and audio, a whiteboard feature, chat, and application/web sharing. Blackboard Collaborate is located in the Tools section of your Blackboard course.

• Information Technology Services overview page 
• Collaborate documentation
• Collaborate overview using Collaborate to demonstrate the tool (open the downloaded jnlp file)
• First make sure you have the latest version of Java installed

Blackboard IM is a live text-based Chat which you can use with your students. Blackboard IM is located in the Tools section of your Blackboard course.

• Blackboard IM Product Overview
• Blackboard IM user guide
• Blackboard IM online help and manuals

Blackboard Discussion Boards are a well-understood traditional asynchronous way to post content and have your students communicate with the instructor and each other.

• Discussion Board video overview
• Discussion Board Documentation

Tegrity: To record a prepared video lecture which you can offer to the students as part of your online classroom experience, please use the Tegrity Class Capture feature, located in your Blackboard course.

• Information Technology Services Overview
• To record a class from your Blackboard Course
• Tegrity documenation for instructors
• Northeastern Tegrity Blog

Google Hangouts/Google On Air

For casual, non-moderated live video collaborate, we can recommend "Google Hangouts On Air". This service allows you to broadcast video and audio to many people with whiteboard and document collaboration.  This service is not affiliated with Northeastern University, but you can invite the students from your Blackboard course to your Hangout by getting their email addresses from your Blackboard course site.

• Google Hangout On Air overview
• Start a Hangout-on-air
• Use your student’s email address to invite students, available in your Blackboard course
• You may obtain a list of your students' email addresses from Blackboard > Course Tools > Student Email Addresses