Tag Archives: mylesley

New and Improved myLesley Features

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The myLesley upgrade brought with it several new and improved features designed to enhance the teaching and learning experience. These features are designed to save you time, improve efficiency and easy of use, provide a much improved mobile experience, improve accessibility of your content and Blackboard functionality, and enhance assessments and grade capabilities.

Discussion Board “Replies to Me”
A new count and filter identifies unread replies to your Discussion Board posts, allowing you to quickly and easily keep up with large Discussion forums.

screenshot of discussion board replies to me

 

Drag and Drop Files
Easily drag and drop files from your computer to the hot spot in the Attach Files area to upload them. Students can also drag and drop files to upload their assignments.

screenshot of dragging and dropping assignment file

 

Collaborate Ultra Available in Groups
You now have the ability to allow Collaborate Ultra webinar sessions to Groups pages. If allowed, students can meet online, share content and use the whiteboard, as well as record their online meetings. For more information see Group Tools or Blackboard Collaborate Ultra: Getting Started.

 

Improved Mobile Device Navigation 
The new myLesley theme includes navigation improvements for both the system and course menus. When you access myLesley on your mobile device, the navigation appears a hamburger menu (three horizontal lines) for persistent access from screen to screen. Within a course, the menu opens and closes more easily with fixed location action.

screenshot of mobile view

 

More Responsive Blogs and Journals
Blogs and Journals have been better optimized for use on mobile devices. Posts and comments will render on smaller devices and options for filtering posts or navigating groups or users will appear below currently viewed posts.

New Inline Grading Tool
The new inline grading tool, New Box View, is now available in myLesley. This streamlined grading tool accepts more file types. For more information see Grading myLesley Assignments or view the tutorial video below.

 

More Efficient Grade Center Cleanup
You can now easily clean up your Grade Center, including bulk deleting grade columns. Manual and calculated columns are removed completely, and columns associated with gradable items are cleared of attempt and grade data but remain in the Grade Center.

Before deleting columns, check very carefully that it’s the right column. Deleted grade columns cannot be recovered. For more information see Organize Grade Data.

 

Submission Receipts
Once you submit an assignment, the Review Submission History page appears with information about your submitted assignment and a success message with a confirmation number. For assignments with multiple attempts, you receive a different number for each submission. You will also receive an email with your confirmation number and details each time you submit coursework.

 

Improved Grading with Rubrics
When grading with rubrics, the instructor can save feedback and the content will remain saved when changing the rubric view from in-line to full screen. For more information on rubrics see myLesley Rubrics.

 

Missing Coursework Reminders
You can now send email reminders to your students directly from Grade Center columns to remind them about missing coursework.

Why Can’t I Change the Color of my Course Menu?

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I used to be able to change the colors on my course menu, but now it’s not working. What happened?
In short, the recent myLesley upgrade introduced a new theme, or look and feel. The new theme does not allow instructors to change the course menu background color or text color.
 
Why the change?
The new theme brought many improvements, including increased speed, the ability to adapt to your screen/device, and improved bug fixes. Unfortunately, the downside of these improvements is that the ability to change the colors in your course menu has been lost. We had conversations with members of TL Tech and it was decided that the benefit of an improved user experience outweighed the few features that were lost.
 
What can I do?
While you may no longer customize the color of your course menu. You may, however, add different colored menu buttons. To add menu buttons, navigate to your course Control Panel, select Customization, and select Teaching Style.

screenshot of course control panel

Scroll down to Select Menu Style. Click Text for the default black background with white text. Or click Buttons to create colored menu buttons.
 
select menu style

Click Button Library to expand the button library. For Button Type you may select pattern, solid, or striped. For Button Shape you may select rounded corners, rectangular, or rounded ends. Select the button color and style you want and click Submit at the bottom of the page to save your changes.

image of button library

Please note that the menu text color will remain white. As a best practice, we recommend that you select a button color that has a good contrast with the white text for readability and accessibility.

If your menu item has a lot of text and rolls onto a second line, your second line of text will not be visible in the button. Instead, your text will appear in the black space below your button. See the “Reading and Additional Resources” menu item in the screenshot below.

Sample course menu with buttons

 

Can I add a banner to my course?
Definitely! You can easily add a course banner to, at a glance, differentiate between your courses. The banner will appear at the top of your course’s landing page (ex Announcements) and allows you to add a pop of color or personality to your course such as the fall leaves in our image below.

sample myLesley course with banner

To add a banner image, navigate to your course Control Panel, select Customization, and select Teaching Style.
 
screenshot of course control panel
 
Scroll down to Select Banner and click Browse My Computer to upload an image. Please note that Blackboard recommends using an image that is approximately 480 x 80 pixels for your banner image. You my create or edit an existing image using a photo editor, such as Pixlr Editor.
 
select banner
 
Once you have uploaded your image, click Submit at the bottom of the page to save your changes. The banner image will then appear on the course’s landing page.
 
 

myLesley is available!

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myLesley is now on the latest version of Blackboard (Q4 2017). Most of the changes are behind the scenes to improve performance.

However, there are a few changes you should be aware of:

  • A new look using a more responsive theme that will allow you to better access myLesley regardless of your device (computer, tablet, phone).
  • Blackboard is updating its inline grading tool for grading student submitted assignments directly in myLesley to the New Box View.
  • Blackboard IM (BB IM) has been retired from myLesley. We recommend switching to Skype for Business and Collaborate Ultra.
  • Collaborate Original has been retired from myLesley and replaced with the newer and easier to use web-based Collaborate Ultra. Collaborate Original recordings will still be available through this academic year, but you will not be able to create new Original sessions.

If you have questions or concerns, please email eLIS@lesley.edu.

 

The Blackboard App: A Student’s Perspective

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Today’s post is by Lesley grad student, Mike Yaniv.

It is no secret that the reality of being a graduate student means balancing a personal, academic, and financial life. Often, students have jobs, internships and full-time course loads. Consequently, one of the more challenging but critical aspects of being a successful graduate student is not necessarily the course load itself, but managing the flow of information, time, and organization. As students rely more and more on technology to handle an increasing stream of information (and memory retention), good quality applications are not only important but are becoming crucial. The Blackboard mobile app represents a convenient and effective tool that has quickly become integral for managing time and coursework.

screenshot of the Blackboard Student app

Bb Student App screenshot

Opening the blackboard student app presents the student with the activity stream window, which includes recent course announcements, upcoming due dates, and recent course activity (including graded assignments, recent discussion board posts/replies). The app also allows students to easily participate in discussion boards, contribute to blogs/journals and wikis, and even submit assignments. Additionally, by going into the course view, all the information students need is presented in one convenient screen, allowing students to view current grades, due dates, announcements, course content, discussions, and instructor information.

This kind of robust package, combined with a convenient and easy to understand interface, has significantly improved my time management and organization. Navigation through the app is seamless and natural, requiring a very small learning curve while retaining a feature-rich experience.

In order for this app to really live up to its potential, we recommend the following best practices:

  • Use the Announcements tool for course communication. This will ensure that students receive the information in myLesley, in the app, and also via email. More information on using the Announcements tool may be found here: Communicating Within Your myLesley Course.
  • Add due dates to assignments, tests, and other graded content (such as graded discussions, blogs, etc.). This will ensure that students can track and manage upcoming due dates for all of their course assignments in the calendar tool.

Ensuring the quality of content and following a best practice approach to building a course can have a meaningful and positive impact on student performance and experience in a course. Together with the Blackboard mobile app, managing a course has the potential to become less stressful and a lot more manageable.

Grading Offline This Winter Break

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During the upcoming winter break myLesley will transition to a SaaS environment and upgrade to the latest version of Blackboard (Q4 2017). The upgrade and migration to the new servers will take place from Saturday, December 30, 2017 to Wednesday, January 3, 2018. You will not have access to myLesley during this time. All other Lesley services will be available.

We highly recommend completing your grading by Friday, December 29th. However, we understand that many faculty use the winter break to do their grading. With that in mind, we have provided some resources for downloading your students’ gradable items so that you can grade offline when the server is down. The instructions include downloading student submitted assignments, collecting and printing discussions, saving blog, journal and wiki content to PDF, and downloading a copy of your Grade Center.

Please keep in mind that you must complete these steps by December 29th. You will not have access to myLesley from December 30 – January 3.

If you have any questions or need assistance, please email elis@lesley.edu.