The new features in Blackboard’s July upgrade are available now. This month’s upgrade includes the following new/improved features to Ultra courses:
- New NILE courses for the 24/25 academic year now available
- New option to generate a Turnitin similarity report when using Blackboard assignments
- Improvements to the grading interface for Blackboard assignments and tests
- Improvements to printing tests and assessments
- Improvements to announcements
- Enrolling students onto NILE courses
- Uploading video and audio files to NILE
- Increased adverts on YouTube videos (from 1st August)
- End of life for guest access to NILE, including welcome courses and organisations, and removal of old Original courses and organisations (from 31st December)
New NILE courses for the 24/25 academic year now available
Creation of new NILE courses for the 24/25 academic year has been completed, and staff are now able to enrol on and begin setting up their new NILE courses.
If content needs to be copied into a new NILE course from an old one, please ensure that the correct process is followed as this will reduce the likelihood of problems occurring later on in the new course, especially around non-functioning assignment submission points. More information about the course copy process is available from: Learning Technology Team – How do I copy content into a NILE Ultra course?
Full guidance about enrolling on and setting up new NILE courses is available from: Learning Technology Team – Getting your NILE course set up and ready for teaching
Following the move to the SITS student records system, NILE Course IDs are now in four parts, not three. e.g., PHI1001-SUN-2425-S1. The first part of the course ID is the module code; in this case, PHI1001. The second part of the course ID is the session code, in this case SUN. SUN (Standard University of Northampton) is a common session code and denotes that the course is delivered on campus here at the University of Northampton. The third part of the course ID is the academic year; in this case 2425, denoting the academic year 2024/2025. The final part of the course ID refers to the semester in which the course is taught; in this case S1, semester one. More information about the new NILE course IDs is available from: Learning Technology Team – How do I decode my NILE course ID?
Please note that, following new guidance issued to UK HEIs by the Office for Students, the NILE Design Standards have been updated this year, with the addition of the following items to section A: ‘Availability of course content in NILE courses’, and; ‘Availability of student assessment, grades and feedback in NILE’.
New option to generate a Turnitin similarity report when using Blackboard assignments
A popular request from staff has been the ability to use Blackboard’s assignment submission tool, but to also generate Turnitin similarity reports for work submitted. Prior the July upgrade this was not possible, and staff had to choose between generating a Turnitin submission report, or using Blackboard’s more flexible and feature rich assignment tool. However, following the July upgrade, and along with the switch to the new and improved flexible grading interface for Blackboard assignments and tests (see below), a new Turnitin integration has also been enabled in NILE allowing Turnitin similarity reports to be generated when using a Blackboard assignment.
More information about using Turnitin with Blackboard assignments is available from: Blackboard Help – Turnitin
Improvements to the grading interface for Blackboard assignments and tests
The gradebook in Ultra courses has been upgraded to Blackboard’s new flexible grading interface. This will not affect staff assessing Turnitin assignments, but staff marking Blackboard assignments and tests will notice a marked improvement in the grading interface, which is more intuitive and which allows for quicker and easier access to all Blackboard’s grading tools.
More information about grading assignments using the new interface is available from: Blackboard Help – Grade Assignments With Flexible Grading
More information about grading tests using the new interface is available from: Blackboard Help – Grade Tests With Flexible Grading
Improvements to printing tests and assessments
Following on from last month’s upgrade, which introduced the option for staff to print Ultra tests and assignments, this month’s upgrade adds the option to select whether to include both the questions and correct answers (where specified), or just the questions.
Improvements to announcements
Prior to the July upgrade, staff were not able to select both the ‘Schedule announcement’ and the ‘Send an email copy to recipients’ options when creating an announcement. Following the upgrade, it will be possible for staff to both schedule an announcement, and to send a copy via email at the time the announcement is scheduled. Previously, students were notified by email of scheduled announcements in a digest email sent the following morning, but staff now have the option for the email notification of the announcement to be sent as soon as the scheduled announcement is live.
Enrolling students onto NILE courses
Following the introduction of the SITS student records system, all enrolments onto and removals of students from module-level and programme-level NILE courses will be handled by a new SITS/NILE integration, which replaces the previous QL/NILE integration. Because of the need to ensure that the NILE student enrolment record and the SITS student enrolment record remain synchronised at all times, there is no longer any option for staff to manually enrol students onto NILE courses, or to remove students, change their role, or change their availability. Where a student is not enrolled on a NILE course but should be, this can no longer be fixed by manually enrolling the student; instead, the reason for non-enrolment must be identified and remedied in SITS, following which the student will be enrolled on the NILE course.
As a result of these changes, staff will no longer have access to view the ‘Member information’ panel in NILE, meaning that students’ UON email addresses are not viewable to staff in NILE. However, staff can still send emails to students via the announcements and messages tool. Where staff need to know a particular student’s email address, this information is available in the new Student Record View (SRV) tool, which is the SITS replacement for OASIS. For training on SRV please see: Staff Development: SRS -SRV Training
Staff still retain the ability to enrol themselves and other instructors onto their NILE courses, and to enrol their external examiners and other members of UON staff who are supporting their students.
Uploading video and audio files to NILE
Prior to the July upgrade there have been multiple methods of uploading a video or audio file to NILE, and it has not been clear as to the best method to use. Following the upgrade, staff and students will now be advised to use Kaltura, the University’s dedicated media streaming system, when uploading audio and video files to NILE. In order to assist with this process, if a video or audio file is being uploaded to NILE via a different method, staff and students will see a helpful pop-up screen prompting them to use Kaltura instead, and providing links to support materials which explain how to do this.
There are several advantages of uploading media files to NILE using Kaltura. Of particular importance, and unlike other upload methods which are subject to a maximum file size limit of 1024MB (1GB), there are no file size limits for uploads to NILE via Kaltura. This is especially useful for video files which can and often do exceed the 1024MB limit. Additionally, video files uploaded via Kaltura are transcoded to multiple streaming formats, allowing for the best viewing experience across different devices and different Internet connection speeds. This allows the viewing of video files in full HD quality on devices with large screens and good connection speeds, while also allowing videos to be viewed on devices with slower connection speeds without frequent stops to the playback while loading the video. And to aid accessibility, all Kaltura media is also auto-transcribed/captioned, and where auto-transcriptions are manually checked and edited for accuracy, they meet the required standards for accessibility.
More information for staff about Kaltura is available from: Learning Technology Guides – Kaltura
More information about video accessibility and transcription/captioning is available from: Learning Technology Guides – Captioning Collaborate lectures, Kaltura recordings, and other video and audio content
Increased adverts on YouTube videos (from 1st August)
YouTube videos embedded in NILE are currently subject to the same advertising policies as videos viewed directly on YouTube. This includes pre-roll, mid-roll, and post-roll adverts. Google, who own YouTube, have announced that starting August 1st 2024, the number of adverts shown in embedded videos will increase, meaning more interruptions during video playback. As an alternative to YouTube, staff may like to consider making use of Box of Broadcasts (BoB) to source media content.
More information about BoB is available from: Learning Technology Team – Box of Broadcasts (BoB)
End of life for guest access to NILE, including welcome courses and organisations, and removal of old Original courses and organisations (from 31st December)
In order to implement necessary security measures, from the 1st of January 2025 guest access to NILE will no longer be possible. This means that only logged in users will be able to access NILE. Guest access to Ultra courses has never been possible, however, some old Original courses, including welcome courses, may still be available via guest access and the information they contain may need to be relocated.
Additionally, please note that while most NILE courses are regularly archived and removed from NILE in accordance with the NILE Archiving and Retention Policy, some old Original courses and organisations remain on the system and will continue to be removed from NILE on a rolling ten year basis. Currently, all Original courses and organisations created before 01/01/2014 are no longer available on NILE, and courses created before 01/01/2015 will be no longer be available from 1st January 2025.
Staff who are concerned that they may be affected by either of these matters are encouraged to contact Robert Farmer, the Learning Technology Manager, to discuss their requirements. Where information needs to be available to people who do not have a NILE login, it will be necessary to use another platform to provide this. However, where using NILE is still the best option, we will be happy to provide a new Ultra course or organisation to replace the old Original one.
More information
As ever, please get in touch with your learning technologist if you would like any more information about the new features available in this month’s upgrade: Who is my learning technologist?
