Here’s my latest post in the series describing the changes in the next version of Blackboard. (If you want to see others, simply click Blackboard 9 in the tag cloud on the right (or the link at the bottom of the post) and it’ll bring all the posts on the subject together.)
There have been some changes to the announcement features in Blackboard 9.1. The main change is that Email notifications no longer contain the full body of the announcement text, but simply offer a link to the announcement. This means that users will now have to log into Blackboard to read the announcement. Blackboard have also removed the announcement date filter because they were getting feedback that students were missing important announcements because they didn’t log in until after the announcement had been filtered (In our current version announcements are shown for 7 days after they are made, and after that, if a student wishes to see them, they have to click the “announcements in the last 30 days” tab.)
On the plus side, announcements can now be displayed in courses, the front page, and on a special course specific announcement module – so students can choose to have a module on their front pages that displays only announcements from a specific course.
Perhaps more usefully, instructors can now set the order in which announcements are displayed, thus removing the need for “permanent” announcements to be used to display an announcement first, although it will still be possible to use permanent announcements.
Adaptive release will not change significantly, although it will be possible to notify students when a particular item becomes available (for example, after a given date), and you won’t need to click to confirm quite so many times when you’re creating an adaptive release rule. As with many features in Blackboard 9.1, you can access the controls from a link to a drop down menu adjacent to the title. (When you’re in Edit mode)
Hi,
I’m struggling with announcements in 9.1. There is no option when creating a new announcement to email that announemenst to students.
How do you email the announcement link to students?
Thanks
HI Andy
Me too. You do have to turn notifications on in the Sys Admin panel, but I still couldn’t get it to work
After much searching, I did find this site http://www.ltu.edu/ehelp/blackboard_alerts.asp which says there’s a known issue with e-mailing announcements and offers a work around. Our online services team are upgrading to Service Pack 4, although whether that will fix it remains to be seen.
Hi Guys,
We figured out the lack of “Email Announcement” option when we had some peopel from blackboard out for training – if you have any users in the course who do not have an email address associated with their account then this option will vanish (students, teaching team etc).
I have a question about the perminant announcement point made in this post though, we are using Bb 9.1 SP 9 and I can not for the life of me find anyway to set an announcement as perminant. How do you accomplish this (so that an announcement will always show in the module, not vanish after 30 days).
Kind Regards,
Renee
Hi Renee
I don’t know about the permanent announcement feature (to be honest, we found it was overused anyway by some colleagues, so that relevant recent announcements were being pushed off the screen by too many sticky permanent announcements, but if you felt it important, you could presumably use the date options to set the announcement to display until the end of the course. You’d probably have to keep re-ordering them though so your important announcements appeared first. In BB9 I think the best approach would be to use the course home page feature for information that you always wanted students to see whenever they logged in
Best wishes