Fall Pilot

The Centre for Academic Excellence is piloting the release of a quarterly digest to share updates or changes to core technologies used for teaching and learning at Niagara College. The digest was created to provide faculty with information and resources to support their use of educational technologies.

As this is our first release of the digest, we are very interested in hearing your feedback. Please share any recommendations for the digest through this survey link.

Blackboard Updates

Tests, Surveys, and Pools: Support for media and files in more places

Following an update in February, Blackboard has expanded options for attaching files and embedding media in test and survey questions.  The question types and fields below now support attached files and media using the Add Content button in the editor:

  • Calculated formula: Question text
  • Essay: Answer text
  • Matching: Question/Answer pairs
  • Multiple Answer: Answer options
  • Multiple Choice: Answer options
  • Ordering: Answer options
  • Short Answer: Answer text

Blackboard Collaborate Ultra - Gallery View

Within the Collaborate Ultra web conferencing tool, course instructors may now decide how many videos they would like to  see and how prominent those videos should be with Gallery view, Tiled view, and Speaker view. Gallery view lets you see the most students at one time. With this view you can see up to 25 attendees on a page. 25 is the optimum number of videos you can show on a page and still see enough detail for visual non-verbal feedback.

Blackboard Collaborate Ultra – Pin videos 

When you pin a video, it moves the video to the top of the list and pins, or anchors, it there. It doesn’t change the number of videos you see, just the order you see them in. Course instructors may find this option helpful when focusing on specific students during, for example, online presentations or demonstrations. Students can also take advantage of this option to stay focused on the instructor, or see their study buddies. Use the Attendee controls in the Attendees list or in the lower right corner of a video to pin and unpin videos.

Blackboard Collaborate Ultra – Updated whiteboard features  

With the new whiteboard faculty and students can enjoy better formatting, usability, and annotation persistence. With the improvements to the annotation tools, attendees can enjoy these features on a session whiteboard or shared file.

  • Better formatting: Pencil thickness, fonts and font size, shapes with color fill, arrows, and more are added to the annotation tools.
  • Usability: It’s easier to copy and reuse elements and paste text. You can now erase part of the annotations or clear all. There are multi line text blocks, text wrapping, and safeguards before clearing all annotations.
  • Interaction with breakout groups: You can annotate a file in the main room and then share it with the breakout groups including annotations. You can bring a breakout group’s own annotated file into the main room together with its annotations.

More on sharing files with breakout groups

  • Annotation persistence: Annotations made to the whiteboard, or on a file, are saved in the session. You can share something new, go to a new slide, or stop sharing. The annotations remain. Select Clear Annotations to remove them all.
  • Create a blank file of several pages to have a multi-page whiteboard.

Teams Updates

Teams online meeting – Recordings  

For faculty who have recorded a Teams online meeting, those recordings will now be saved to SharePoint or to OneDrive, depending on your meeting settings.  If you are reviewing the footage in OneDrive or SharePoint, you will notice that important features such as editing video footage and accessing transcripts are not available. These features can only be accessed for video content saved in Microsoft Stream. To ensure that students can review accessible video content, we encourage faculty to download Teams recordings from OneDrive or SharePoint and upload them into MS Stream.

To upload recordings into Stream, please watch the CAE’s videos on Accessing Teams Meeting Recordings and Uploading and Captioning Lesson Recordings Using MS Stream

Teams online meeting – PowerPoint Live 

Microsoft has released an updated sharing experience for PowerPoint documents within Teams online meetings. This unique experience benefits both faculty and students in synchronous online meetings, offering the rich presenting capabilities of PowerPoint and the collaboration of Microsoft Teams. The view you see as the presenter is yours only – review notes, engage in chats, and see your audience – all in one panel view. Students have the option to “take control” and gain access to the presenter view, making it simpler to switch between co-presenters during group presentations. Learn more. 

Education Insights

Ever wonder if you could look behind the curtain and understand how students are engaging in your Teams site? Now, with Education Insights built directly into Teams sites, you can. Make informed instructional decisions with data such as online class attendance, assignment engagement, class activity, and more. Add the Education Insights App to your Teams site to grant yourself a powerful lens to support students. Learn more.

Reflect app  

Reflect is a check-in tool that faculty can leverage to open conversations about Social Emotional Learning, or simply take the temperature of their class. With emoji-based check-ins, students are prompted to select an emoticon that best describes their emotions in relation to a preset personal or learning question. Through Education Insights, educators can see how students respond to check-ins over time, making it easier to identify and address student needs. Learn more.

Teams online meeting- Breakout rooms  

Breakout room updates, including participant retention and room reassignment
Now, it’s quicker to manage your meetings with students and get every student into the right breakout room. Organizers can reassign participants to rooms whether they are open or closed, so you can move students without closing rooms first. Many classrooms work in the same group configurations over and over again, so it’s now possible to set up groups and then reuse them for future breakout room sessions, saving you time during a busy day of teaching and learning.  Learn more.

Other Teaching Tools

VoiceThread Assignments  

A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows students to navigate slides and leave comments in 5 ways – using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). New VoiceThread assignments are available this Fall! There are three types of assignment you can create:

VoiceThread Assignments offer faculty private upload options for digital media submissions, unique testing options tied to commenting or watching online media, and simpler grading processes for student uploads. If you would like to try out the new features and see how they differ from the older assignment options, please visit the transition details page

If you have any questions about how these updates may affect your Fall course do not hesitate to reach out to the Centre for Academic Excellence. Email us at [email protected] or book an online consultation.