University of Southern California USC

Blackboard News

Posted on April 10, 2012 by CST

PERFORMANCE DASHBOARD

Recently an instructor asked if there is a place in Blackboard where instructors can go to view student activity within a course. Blackboard tracks and logs course activity—e.g., discussion board activity—and is a great place to view a snapshot of course activity.

In the Performance Dashboard, enrolled students are listed along with pertinent information about their progress and a complete log of their activity in the course.

To access the Performance Dashboard to view student activity in your course, go to the Course Management menu:

    1. Click Evaluation.
    2. In the Evaluation menu, click the Performance Dashboard.
    3. In the Discussion Board column, you will see the number of comments posted by any given student.
    4. Click any number in this column to see a student’s comments.

Once you click a number, you will be directed to a different page, which includes:

    • Each forum the student has participated in.
    • The number of times the student has commented in each forum.
    • The date of the last posting.
    • The average length of the posting in characters.
    • The minimum length of a posting in characters.
    • The maximum length of a posting in characters.

DOWNLOAD YOUR GRADE CENTER

Did you know that you can download a copy of your Blackboard Grade Center as a Microsoft Excel file?  All you need to do is:

    1. Open your Blackboard course’s Grade Center.
    2. In the top-right corner of the Grade Center, click Work Offline > Download.
    3. Leave all of the options on the Download Grades page unchanged and click the yellow Submit button.
    4. On the next page, click the Download button.
    5. Choose to save the file to your computer.

Once you have downloaded the file on your computer, double-click the file to automatically open it in Microsoft Excel.  Alternatively, you can launch Microsoft Excel and then go to File > Open.

While Blackboard courses and their Grade Centers remain on Blackboard for four calendar years following the conclusion of a semester, it is always a good practice to keep a personal copy of your course’s Grade Center stored in a secure location.

PRINTING BLACKBOARD FILES

A quick and easy alternative to choosing Print from the File menu is to left-click the portion of the Blackboard page you want to print (this tells your web browser to pay attention to this part of the screen) then right-click on that same area and choose the appropriate Print command for your browser.

    • In Internet Explorer, right-click and choose Print.
    • In Mozilla Firefox, right-click and choose This Frame > Print Frame.
    • In Apple Safari, right-click and choose Print Frame.
    • In Google Chrome, right-click and choose Print.

If none of these methods work for you, you may want to download the file from Blackboard to your computer’s hard drive, open the file on your computer, and then print it.

We have created a movie that demonstrates this process. You can view it here.

COMING SOON: Blackboard Best Practices Tutorial Course

Interested in deepening your understanding of how to use Blackboard’s more advanced tools and features, such as tracking students, creating lessons, embedding surveys, or embedding Twitter feeds?  Later this year, you’ll see a new course in your My Courses Plus list titled “Blackboard Best Practices” that will cover these topics and more.  Look for additional information in our upcoming TWT Newsletters.

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