for Faculty and Course Support teams

What are BB Learn Enhancement tools?

If you are an instructor or provide course support for a an online course, you probably have encountered moments when you thought, “Now why is it so hard to do something which should be so easy to do?” We manage many online courses and have mumbled that same comment under our breath many times. To cut the story short, we put a wish list together of how to make Connect easier to work with and challenged Joseph Khalil (Senior Web Programmer, Course Production, Design & Support, Distance & Blended Learning, CTLT) to come up with solutions.

Solution: Firefox Greasemonkey addon scripts or tools which run within the Firefox browser to add functionality to the BB Learn platform.

Step 1: Install tools (ignore if already installed)

Step 2: Install Blackboard Mapping View Tool

• Blackboard Mapping View Tool (Required)– Click to Download ↓

Features:

• Show File Path;
  – Under the page title, the script will display the full file path (name and directories) of the location of the page in the Content Collection.
  
• Replaces the Name field with the name in the HTML page’s Title tag ;
  – When you add HTML files to the Learning Module, currently the Learning Module link will only display the filename of the page instead of the Page title.  This script will automatically fill in the text from the Title tag in the HTML file into (Name) box.
  • For example instead of  seeing “filename.html” in the menu of the Learning Module, the script will now show “Module 1: Sample Page”

Step 3: Install Additional Addons
Once you are logged in to any course shell in Connect, you will see:

• a new button called “Help” in the top right corner of the screen
  
• Click on the Help button to download additional Addons
  • Compile tool
  • Preview tool
  • Expand tool
  • My Media tool