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.
Blackboard Updates
Integration between breakout rooms in Blackboard Collaborate Ultra and groups in Blackboard course sites
Start breakout groups in Blackboard Collaborate Ultra with the groups created in your Blackboard Learn course site. Use your existing course groups to create breakout groups in advance and save time in synchronous sessions. Build on existing student collaboration with established groups.
With the Collaborate and Blackboard Learn integration, students can stay in their same group for breakout sessions without extra work for the instructor. In the Collaborate session, the instructor can also enjoy some flexibility and adjust groups as needed without impacting the groups in Learn. For example, an instructor could balance groups among attendees if some groups had more or fewer participants than others. When you start a breakout group in Collaborate, go to the Assign Groups menu and select Course group set. Choose the set of groups you want to use and start the breakout session.
Adjust recording playback speed for Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings
More and more students are using recordings to review course content and catch up on missed sessions. With that in mind, and based on student feedback, anyone can now adjust the speed of Blackboard Collaborate Ultra recordings to suit their viewing needs.
With this feature, viewers can choose between a range of speeds (0.5x, 0.75x, 1x, 1.25, 1.5, 2x) to playback recorded video.
Archiving Blackboard Collaborate Recordings
Starting January 17th, 2022, ITS will be archiving Blackboard Collaborate recordings as a part of our Blackboard Course archiving process announced earlier this year. The criteria used to determine which Collaborate recordings to archive will be the same as the existing course archiving process. Any Collaborate recording contained within a course that has a term end date greater than 395 days old (one year plus 30 days) will be flagged for archiving. This change will impact recordings associated with term 1204 (Fall 2020) forward. Recordings made prior to 1204 (Fall 2020) will not be impacted.
Upcoming archiving dates:
• Courses and Collaborate recordings from term 1204 (Fall 2020) will be disabled and archived on Jan 17th, 2022.
• Courses and Collaborate recordings from term 1211 (Winter 2021) will be disabled and archived on May 23rd, 2022.
Future archiving dates can be found on the ITS website along with additional archiving related resources.
MS Teams Updates
Host more accessible class meetings and record more accessible course video, including auto-captions and transcripts, via MS Teams online meetings.
Microsoft has recently made changes to the process for hosting more accessible meetings and recording accessible video in Teams. Faculty can expect a more streamlined process and easy options for auto-captioning and transcript creation during MS Teams meetings and in any associated recordings. To learn more about this recording update, review the Recording and Sharing Accessible Video with MS Teams resource.
Microsoft Teams: View switcher
The new view switcher in the top bar of a Teams meeting allows participants to control how they prefer to see the meeting content. Choose between Together mode, Focus, Gallery at top, and Full screen. For more detail on customizing different views, please visit this website.
Microsoft Teams: Press to unmute
Meeting participants can temporarily unmute by press Ctrl +Space (Windows) and Option + Space (macOS) to speak.
Microsoft Teams and Forms: Word cloud for polls in Teams
When Faculty have collected responses for an open text poll in a Teams meeting, word cloud data insight will be available to help them get a quick view of the top text phrases shared by participants.
Moderator support added to breakout rooms
Microsoft has added the ability for a meeting organizer to extend the management of breakout rooms to others in the meeting who are listed as “presenters”. This change would better allow student presenters or those leading an activity to manage breakout room specifics for the duration of a meeting, including the capability to:
• Add and delete rooms
• Assign and reassign participants to rooms
• Open and close rooms
• Join any rooms
• Set time limits for room sessions
• Send announcements
• Recreate rooms
Please visit the MS Teams moderator page to learn more about this feature.
Questions and Feedback
If you have any questions about how these updates may affect your Winter course do not hesitate to reach out to the Centre for Academic Excellence. Email us at [email protected] or book an online consultation. As always, we are very interested in hearing your feedback. Please share any recommendations for the digest through this survey link.