navigating SFU’s learning management system
Suggestion sent to the developers at WebCT/Blackboard
I’d like to be able to “preview” an anncouncement before I send it. Oftentimes, the message looks completely different once I’ve sent it due to HTML coding.
Remember that you can make your own suggestions to them here. The more suggestions they get, the more likely they are to implement them.
Today’s suggestion sent to WebCT/Blackboard:
When creating a new announcement in a class, currently I can either sent a pre-determined end-date or it can be an ongoing announcement. Once I’ve created an announcement without and end date, however, I cannot remove it from the announcements without deleting it. I’d like to be able to “expire” an existing announcement - that way the students don’t see it any more, but I can still see it as an expired announcement.
Remember that you can make your own suggestions to them here. The more suggestions they get, the more likely they are to implement them.
When you create an anonymous discussion topic, the option is to “make authors anonymous to students.” This implies that the discussion postings would not be anonymous to designers and instructors. In fact, postings are anonymous to everyone, including designers and instructors.
This is has been reported to WebCT, and will be fixed in the next application pack (January 2007).
When sending email to group members, sometimes not all the members will show up in the mail. This has been reported to WebCT (October 2006), and they are working on this bug (as of February 2007).
In the short term, you can either use private group discussion areas, or manually add the missing group member to a mail message in WebCT.
The comments field in the grade book records comments in the audit trail log, so that TAs and instructor can track and share comments. Those comments are not visible to the student. Unfortunately you cannot make this comments box smaller - one work-around is to export the gradebook to Excel, where you will have a more efficient use of screen real estate.
If you want to give students comments, try creating a text column in the gradebook called something like “Midterm Comments” and put it next to the Midterm grade column. Then you can put the comments in and have them show up for the students.
The other option is to use a PeopleLink to send the student mail with the comment while you are grading the discussion posts.
One of the tools that you can add to a WebCT course section is the Search tool. This search tool will search through all HTML pages in your WebCT course section.
The search tool does not currently work in the discussion area. It will return 0 hits, even on words that you know are found in the discussion area.
This has been reported to WebCT (September 2006).
It was driving me nuts: I’d open up a new mail message or discussion posting and start typing away. The curser would suddenly jump back to the subject header. It’s nice to know, therefore, that I’m not alone. WebCT is in fact aware of this bug, and a fix should be out in their next hotfix.