Clearing Test Attempts

Once in a while students will have a problem while they are taking an exam.  They may lose Internet access in the middle of the exam, which will result in their being unable to complete the exam or that causes to exam to be submitted automatically.  In these cases, you need to reset the attempt on the exam.

1. Log into Learn and access your course. Through the Control panel below the course menu, select Grade Center, then Full Grade Center.
   
2. Look for the quiz entry score for the quiz you want to reset..
   
3. Put your cursor in that cell. Click the actions link that appears, and select the attempt you want to reset.
   
4. The student’s attempt will appear. Right above the quiz questions and answers, you will see a Test Information link
   
5. Click on that link to expand the test information. The second line in Test Information is Status. This may say In Progress if the student lost connection while taking the test. It may say completed if you use Force Completion or Autosubmit, even if the student was not able to submit the test. The Clear Attempt button is underneath the submitted date and time. Click that button to give the student another attempt on the test or quiz.
   
   
   
6. A window pops up in which you must confirm that you want to remove the attempt. Click OK to remove the attempt or cancel to keep it.
   
7. The student's attempt is now cleared and Learn displays the next attempt, from either that student or another. Click the Exit button to exit the attempts list and return to the grade center.

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When Life Gives You Lemons...

How to Use Blackboard Learn Assessments
to Create Interactive Lectures

Last summer, I wrote about Office Mix and using it to create interactive lectures.  Office Mix is a PowerPoint add-in that allows you to create a narrated PowerPoint with questions embedded for students to answer. Since it is an LTI, you can include your Office Mix in your Blackboard Learn course as a gradable item. Using Mix allows you to take a passive learning task, watching a lecture video, and turn it into an interactive learning exercise. You can also include several other types of items in your Mix, such as Khan Academy content, PhET sims, and other science and math simulations.

Because Mix is PowerPoint based, it has a shallow learning curve; anyone who uses PowerPoint could easily create these interactive lectures simply by inserting questions and other interactive content. Mix is also cloud-based, which meant you could upload and download content across devices. Students can get immediate feedback on their answers, allowing them additional attempts before moving on if you chose. As the instructor, you can get some good analytics about time on task and how many students answered questions correctly. Students find the activities created with Mix engaging, personal, and interesting, and many thought they learned and would retain more of what they learned with these activities more than others.

And...it was free.

However, it did have some technical issues, with students reporting occasional problems in getting the Mix to start or proceed. It also requires students to learn a new technology, rather than use something they already know. That might not seem like much, but about 10% of my students a semester had trouble finding the orange submit button in the upper right. It is limited in the types of questions you could ask, primarily multiple choice and multiple answer for objective questions. Finally, and most significantly, it has no easy way of including closed captions.

Unfortunately,  Microsoft announced last fall that it will no longer support Office Mix as of May 2018. There are other tools that will do something similar to Office Mix, like Adobe Capitvate or Camtasia, but they have steep learning curves and significant costs. Mix itself was being replaced by Microsoft Stream, but it lacks the interactivity. I decided to take the loss of Office Mix as an opportunity to improve my learning activities and make use of tools provide in Blackboard already. I decided on assessments using objective questions to give students immediate feedback and unlimited attempts.

In my online descriptive astronomy course, I have 42 learning activities using Office Mix, three per week for 14 weeks. They average about 20-25 minutes each; some are shorter, some longer. They are designed to be done in one sitting ideally, but students could go in and out of them as needed. Here is a sample Mix:



To convert these to assessments in Learn, I started by going back to the original narrated PowerPoint and split it into micro-lectures. These micro-lectures were anywhere from 2 to 6 minutes long, with a handful as long as 8 minutes. Based on various research, this seems to be the ideal length for videos, although you can go longer for engaging, informative videos. This gave me 3-5 micro-lecture mer narrated PowerPoint. I saved each of these micro-lectures and uploaded them to an unlisted playlist on YouTube.

I could have included the video directly in the Learn course, but that bloats the size of the course, and since we are on managed hosting, course size is a concern. I could have streamed them from Microsoft Stream, but having been burnt by Microsoft once already, I was loathe to trust them again. I chose YouTube because Blackboard Learn allows you to embed YouTube videos easily into your content, and YouTube provides automatic closed captions, which you can edit to improve them (although I find that the automatic ones are pretty good, except for some weird science words).

Once I had the videos on YouTube, I created an assessment in Learn for that learning activity. On the first question, I embedded the first micro-lecture using the YouTube embed code and HTML view in Learn, and included a link to open the video in a new browser window, in case the student could not play it from within the Blackboard Learn question. I followed that question by creating additional questions on the same video, which I already had from my Office Mix. I did, however, change the format of some questions to take advantage of different question types in Learn, like Hotspot and Jumbled Sentence. Once I finished with those questions, I would repeast the process for each micro-lecture. I deployed the assessments with no time limit and unlimited attempts, recording the highest attempt score.

Here is a quick video showing how this learning activity work in Learn.



Again, using both video and questions together encourages active learning. Keeping the video clips short increases the likelihood that students which watch the entire clip. I do provide transcripts for students to print if they want something written to which to refer later, as well as a standard PowerPoint handout. I also provide an optional worksheet for those students who need help in focusing their note taking skills. All of these are simple ways to try to get students to engage with course content.

I do lose the ability to allow students immediate feedback on a per question (as opposed to per assessment) basis. If there was one thing I could get Blackboard to implement, it would be the option to allow students to repeat a question, not just the entire assessment. There are reasons to do that, such as allowing students who are having difficulty discriminating between two choices to try their second choice right away before they forget what it was. There are also reason NOT to do that; students who are convinced their answer is correct are less likely to believe they got the question wrong if they get immediate feedback. But I would at least like that option...

I admit, this is a lot of work. No doubt about it. Converting 42 learning activities from Office Mix to Learn assessments took most of my three-week "break" between the Fall and Spring semesters. But if the payoff is students who are more engaged, more interested, and more likely to succeed, it's worth it.

Reordering Items in Blackboard Learn

There is what appears to be a bug in the drag-and-drop reordering of items in Blackboard Learn after the update. If you try to drag and drop an item below the visible part of the page, the page goes all kerflooey (you'll know it if you see it).

You can use the Keyboard Accessible Reordering Content tool.  At the top of your Blackboard Learn page, to the right of the content menus, you will see two arrows, one pointing up and one pointing down.  The is the the Keyboard Accessible Reordering Content button.

Click that button to bring up the Reorder Content menu.  Select the item you want to move by clicking on its name in the list, and then use the up and down arrows below the list of items to moave it into position.  When you have reordered all of your items, click submit.

A window will pop up telling you the items have been reodered.  Click OK to continue.

Here is a quick video showing you how to do this:

Adding an Office Mix to Blackboard Learn

Once you have created and published your Mix, you will want to add it to your Blackboard Learn course. You can even add it in such a way that the students' scores on the Mix questions will automatically populate in the Blackboard Learn Grade Center.

To add a Mix to Blackboard, follow these steps:

1. Add the Mix tool to a Content Folder or Learning Module.
2. Set the options for the Mix.
3. Connect the Mix Tool to the appropriate Mix.
4. Set the Due Date.

Adding the Mix Tool

Mix is available as a Tool you can add to any Content Folder or Learning Module.  It is available on the Tools menu at the top of the screen. To start adding your Mix, navigate to the area of the course where you want your Mix, and select Office Mix from the Tools Menu:

This will bring up the Create Office Mix page where you can set your options.

Setting Mix Options

Just like with everything else in Learn, you must enter a name for your object at the top of the. You can also add an optional description students will see before they launch their Mix. At the bottom, you can set your availability options, just like you can on any other object in Learn.

Attachments

You can also add attachments to your Mix.  You should print both your PowerPoint handout and the PowerPoint transcripts to PDF files and providing them to students, either as attachments or separate items in the Blackboard Learn Content Folder or Learning Module in which you deploy your Mix. If you use a worksheet to guide your learner through the leaning activity, you can attach that as well.

To attach a file, click the Browse My Computer button to find the file on your computer, or the Browse Course button if you have already uploaded it to the My Files area of your course.

You can add multiple attachments to your Mix by simply browsing for another file after attaching the previous one.

Grading

If you want to enable grading of your Mix, you need to change the default No option to Yes. This will  create a column in your Grade Center and open up the Grading options for you to set.

You must set the total number of points the Mix is worth.  This does not need to be equal to the number of questions in your Mix.  Learn will calculate the appropriate score based on the percentage score Mix sends back for that student.  This allows you to use the appropriate number of questions for your Mix while maintaining a standard number of points for the assignment in the Grade Center.

For example, if you have 12 questions in your Mix, and the student answers 10 correctly, Mix will send a score of 83.3% back for that student.  If your Mix is worth 20 points, Learn will enter a score of 20 x 83.3% or 16.66 in the Grade Center.

While you can add a Due Date on the Mix options, for some reason, it does not always register with Learn.  The last step in the Mix Process is to set the Due Date in the Grade Center to ensure that the Mix appears correctly in the Calendar and My Grades tools for students.

Connecting Your Mix

Once you click Submit on the Create Office Mix page, the tool is added to the bottom of your Content Folder or Learning Module.  You can drag or reorder the tool into the correct position at this point.

However, it is not yet connected to the Mix you want to display.  To make that connection, click on the name of the Mix on the displayed tool.

You will have two options to Select a Mix, either by URL or from a list of your Mixes.

The URL is the link listed on the Details page for your Mix.  If you set the Permissions level for your Mix to either Limited or Organization, you will need to enter a URL.  However, this also requires students to sign in to Office Mix with an Office ID, so that is not a user-friendly option.

You will also need to enter a URL if your Mix is NOT listed in the first ten Mixes on your My Mixes page.  If you create many mixes, your Mix may not display automatically when you select My Mixes, and you need to log into the Office Mix page separately, navigate to the Mix you want, and copy the URL from that Mix's Details page.

If you select My Mixes, Learn will Prompt you to log into Office Mix.  After you log in, you will see a list of your most recent ten Mixes. To select a Mix, just click on its thumbnail.  Again, if you do not see your Mix listed here, you will need to go to the Office Mix page itself and use the By URL option.

After you select your Mix, Learn will ask you to confirm your choice.  Make sure you have the correct Mix selected, because once you make the connection, you cannot change it.  You would need to delete the object completely and start over.

Learn will display the Mix just as students will see it.  This is a good time to test your Mix again, running through the entire Mix to make sure everything works correctly.

Setting the Due Date

Unfortunately, it seems there is a bug in the due date for the Mix tool.  Although you can set a due date on the Create Office Mix options page, it does not seem to "stick," and it will not appear in the Calendar or My Grades tool.  To enter a Due Date for a Mix, navigate to the Full Grade Center, and click the Actions Link at the top of the column for the Mix, and select Edit Column Information.

You can change many options here, but to set the Due Date, scroll to the Dates section, and enter the Due Date as usual.  Now your assignment will appear to students on the Calendar and with a due date in My Grades, increasing the likelihood that students will complete the work on time.

Student View

This is what students will see when they access your Mix.  They can view and download any files you attached and read your description.

To access the Mix itself, students need to click the Click to Launch link. That will open up the Mix in Blackboard Learn for the students to complete.  Once they are done, they click the Turn In button in the upper right corner to submit their Mix for grading.  This sends their score from Mix to Learn, and immediately enters the grade in the Learn Grade Center.

It is important to note that students stay in Learn to complete their Mix.  Unlike with most publisher web sites, they do NOT exit Learn to complete the activity.  This means they do not need to register with the Mix page; all information is sent back and forth from Learn to Mix and back securely, with no further action on the part of you or the student.

Using Student Preview Mode

Many times in Blackboard Learn, you want to see how your course looks to students.  Blackboard now has a Student Preview Mode that creates a new username for you as a student, and shows you exactly what students see.  This is useful when students say they can't see a test that should be available or they don't know how to access something or they don't understand something in their gradebook.  This mode also creates a new student entry in your Grade Center that you can use to verify your total points, for example. Your view as an instructor is significantly different than their view as a student, so using Student Preview Mode is an important tool.

To access Student Preview Mode, enter your course as an instructor.  At the top right of your screen, you will see an icon composed of two arced arrows and a green dot - it looks sort of like an eye. Click that icon to enter Student Preview Mode:

When you are in Student Preview Mode, you can interact with your course exactly as a student does. You will see exactly what a student does, you can try out your tests and assignments to make sure they work the way you want, and you can see how your course navigation works.  Tne only difference between what you see in Student Preview Mode and what your students see is the orange bar at the top of the screen.

When you are ready to exit Student Preview Mode, click the Exit Preview button in the upper right corner on that orange bar.

The first time you do this, a window will pop-up.

To keep the Student Preview User ID in your gradebook, select the Keep the preview user and all data option.  To avoid this pop-up in the future, check the box at the top.

Keeping the preview user and data adds a student row to your Grade Center.

You can use that row to enter the maximum points for each assignment to verify that your total column works correctly.  You can also use it to make sure you have the right columns visible in your grade book, and that you have not hidden active columns from student or from you.

If you want to delete that user, you can access the Student Preview Settings window at any time by entering Student Preview Mode, then clicking the Settings button to bring up the Student Preview Settings pop-up window, and finally, selecting Delete the preview user and all data.

Optimizing Test Options in Blackboard Learn

The test options in blackboard learn have changed over the years. Let's take a look at what the options are and how to set them to present tests and quizzes the way you want.

Test Information

Test information is the information students get about a test or quiz as before they begin that test or quiz.

Every test must have a name. This name will appear as the column heading in the in the grade center.

You can add an optional description of the test that will appear with the link to the test that the students see before they access the test. Here is an example of a test linked in a learning module, as a student would see it.

The description is useful to give students information about the test options before they begin the test be as descriptive as possible to ensure that the students understand what is expected of them on that test.

Test Availability

The next section allows you to choose how and when you make the test available to students. 

To make a test available to students, you must set the first option to yes. When you create a test and deploy it, the default for this option is no. If you don't change this to yes, no matter what other options you set, the test will not be available to students. 

You can also choose to make an announcement about the test; however, the announcement appears immediately. This could be confusing if the test is not yet available. If you are deploying a test for future availability, do not use this option. Instead, create your own announcement, and make it available with the same schedule as the test. 

You can also choose to allow multiple attempts on a test or quiz. If you do not select the multiple attempts option, students will have only one attempt. If you do select multiple attempts, you have the option to select unlimited attempts or to choose a specific number of attempts. If you do allow multiple attempts, then you must also choose which attempt to use in the grade center. You can choose either the highest or the lowest attempt, the great for the first or the last attempt, or an average of all attempts. 

You can also set timing options for your test or quiz. If you select the forced completion option, then Learn will automatically submit the quiz if the student exits the quiz. The student can exit the quiz by closing their browser window, for example. However, if the student loses Internet connectivity, even briefly, learn will assume they have exited the quiz, and submit the quiz even though the student has not yet completed it. If you choose force completion, then in your test description, make sure you explain to students that this may happen, and they should take their test on a networked computer, not on a laptop that is connected wirelessly. 

The timer determines how long a student has to complete a test once they have started it. If you do not choose the forced completion option, students can enter and exit a test multiple times; however, the timer keeps running. The advantage of this is it allows students to reenter a test without losing their work, if they momentarily lose Internet connectivity. Because the timer keeps running even when students are not in the test, this does not give them time to look up answers for the test. 

If you select the auto submit option, then learn that will automatically submit the test when the timer runs out. Students will see a timer as they are taking the test, and they are warned when the test is nearing the end of its allotted time. When time runs out, Learn will save and submit any work completed up to that point. If you do not select auto submit, students can continue working on the test even after the timer runs out. You can see the amount of time that they take By viewing the attempt from the grade center, and then expanding the test information. 

You can choose specific dates between which you would like the test to be available.  The Display After date and time is when the test first becomes available and the Display Until date and time is when the test becomes unavailable.  If you do not select either a Display After or a Display Until date and time, then the availability is controlled by the availability of the content area in which the test is deployed.  For example, if you deploy a test in a learning module that becomes available on a specific date, the test also becomes available on that date.  The advantage of this method is the test due date will be displayed in the calendar, even though the test is not yet available, but students will not be able to access the test because the learning module is not available.  If you control availability using the Display After date, then the due date for the test will not appear in the calendar until after the Display After date you choose in test options.

Test Availability Exceptions

Sometimes you need to change the availability for one student. You may need to change the availability dates or you may need to give the student additional time. You can do that with the Test Availability Exceptions. 

Once you select the user for whom you want to create an exception, that user will appear in a list. You can change the number of attempts, the amount of time the student has to complete the test as well as whether to autos admit it or not, and you can also specify new availability dates. You can set these differently for different students.

This is the best way to extend test time for those students for whom you receive a letter from the Accessibility Office stating that they require additional time to take tests. Simply create a Test Availability Exception for that student and enter the extended time limit in the timer column. 

You can also use a Test Availability Exception for a student who had a technical problem while taking a test. Rather than reset their attempt, you can add an exception to give them an additional attempt. This preserves their work on their original attempt. 

Due Date

The Due Date is the date by which students should complete their test. 

If you set a Due Date that is earlier than the Display Until date, students can still complete the test even after the Due Date. These attempts will be marked as late in the test information available on the test attempt. Even tests that Learn grades automatically, like multiple choice tests, will appear in the Needs Grading list in the Grade Center area of the Control Panel. This allows you to modifythe automatic grade, for example, deleting points for late work. 

Self Assessment Options

For most tests, you will want the grade to be included in the Grade Center. 

You do have the option to allow students to complete tests for which no grade is included in their calculated grade. If you choose not to select Include this Test in Grade Center score calculations, then you will still have a column for the test in the Grade Center, but that column will not be included in any automatic grade calculation. If you choose Hide results for this test completely from the instructor and the Grade Center, you will not have a column in the Grade Center, but students will still be able to see their results. 

Show Test Results and Feedback to Students

Once students have submitted their test you can control what feedback they receive and when they receive it.

If you choose After Submission, students can view their results as soon as they submit the test and as many times as they want. If you choose One-time View, then they can still view their results immediately, but only once. You can also specify a specific date after which results are available, hold them until the due date, or hold them until the test is no longer available. Finally, you can hold the results until all attempts for this test have been graded.

You can also specify of what results to display. For each question, you can display the number of points the students earned as well as the maximum points that question is worth. For questions where the student has answers from which they choose, like multiple choice or true-false questions, you can display the possible answers. You can indicate which of the possible answers is the correct one, and you can indicate which answer the student chose. For each question, you can display any possible feedback and you can also indicate whether the student got a question right or wrong.

On this test, for example, students have unlimited attempts. The test consists entirely of multiple choice and true false questions. Students can view their results as soon as they submit an attempt, but the results consist only of the answer they submitted and whether the answer was correct or incorrect.  The feedback for the question directs them to where they can find the correct answer for that question. However, they do not know what the other possible answers were nor what the correct answer is for the question. This requires them to try to determine the correct answer before attempting the test again rather than simply memorizing what it is.

Presentation

The final options determine how the test is presented to students.

All at Once is the most like a traditional paper and pencil test. Students can scroll up and down through the test, changing answers as many times as they want. If you choose One at a Time, each question is presented separately with a new question appearing after the student submits the answer to the prior question. Students can still moves back and forth through the questions to change answers, unless you select Prohibit Backtracking. While there are times when this presentation method is preferable, in general you should avoid it because it requires a longer period of time for each question to display. Therefore, if you do select One at a Time, and you use a timer on the test include extra time to allow for the additional page displays.

Finally, if you were allowing multiple attempts on the test, and you were pulling questions from a question pool, then you can choose to randomized questions. If you randomized questions, Learn will select a  different set of questions for each attempt.If the number of questions in your pool is the same as the number of questions on your test, Learn will randomized the order in which they display. 

Cleaning up Your Blackboard Learn Course Menu

We tend to add things to our Course Menus without much thought to how they are organized.  Periodically, you should clean up your Course Menu. Delete unneeded items and move other items around to group them according to function or frequency of use.

To delete items:

1. Click the Actions Link to right of the item on the Course Menu.
2. Select Delete.
3. On the confirmation window that appears, click Delete content or Delete this menu item.
• If you are deleting a content folder link, any content at the link will also be deleted. Make sure the folder is empty before you delete the link.
• If you are deleting a Tool link, like a link to Discussions, the discussions will remain, but you will delete the link to them.  If you already have a Discussions link on your Course Menu, you can delete the duplicate link without deleting discussions
4. If a second confirmation window appears, click the Delete button.

To move items, simply put your cursor to the left of the item you want to move.  The arrow cursor with turn into the crosshairs arrow, and you can drag that item to its new position.

If you have more than five or six menu items, consider using dividers, lines that divide your menu items into visual group.  Just click the + at the top left of your Course Menu and select Divider. Then drag your divider into position.

Here is a video showing some of these techniquies: