Exploring Blackboard Learn Features at Schoolcraft College

Blackboard Learn serves as a vital online learning management system (LMS) for Schoolcraft College, offering a wide array of features and tools designed to enhance the educational experience for students, faculty, and staff. This article explores the various aspects of Blackboard Learn at Schoolcraft College, from accessing resources and engaging in discussions to utilizing plagiarism prevention tools and participating in campus events.

Accessing Blackboard Learn and Organizations

To access Blackboard Learn, users can navigate to bb.schoolcraft.edu and log in using their Schoolcraft Network ID as the username and their corresponding password. Once logged in, students can access their courses and organizations. Organizations in Blackboard Learn provide a space for various clubs, departments, and groups within Schoolcraft College to connect with their members, share information, and facilitate communication.

If there is an existing list of individuals who should be added to the Organization, Help Support can enroll them as a bulk operation.

Key Features and Tools within Blackboard Learn Organizations

Discussion Board

The Discussion Board serves as a tool for sharing thoughts and ideas within an organization asynchronously. It resembles an electronic bulletin board, where users can post messages and engage in conversations at their convenience. Within the Discussion Board, a forum represents a general topic for discussion.

Blogs

A Blog is a personal online journal that is frequently updated and intended for general public consumption. In Blackboard, only enrolled users of an Organization can view and author Blogs. Blogs encourage participants to clearly express their ideas and address the need to expand various aspects of social learning.

Read also: Learn about Blackboard Learn at UD

Wikis

Wikis are used to create a collaborative space within an Organization where all participants can view, contribute, and edit content. The Wiki tool allows participants to contribute and modify one or more pages of Organization-related materials, providing a means of sharing and collaboration. Pages can be created and edited quickly while tracking changes and additions, allowing for effective collaboration between multiple contributors. The Organization Leader can create one or more Wikis for all participants to contribute to and Wikis for specific groups to use to collaborate.

Groups

The Groups tool allows Organization Leaders to organize participants into groups of any size. Organization Leaders can provide communication and collaboration tools that only Group members can access. Groups can be created one at a time or in sets. Once created, each Group has its own space in the Organization to work together. The Organization Leader can allow individual Group members to personalize their Group space with personal modules, such as My Calendar and What's New.

Roles within Organizations

Leader: Has access to all areas within the Organization.
Participant: Has no access to the Control Panel and is the default role within an Organization.
Assistant: Has full access to the Control Panel but is not listed in the Organization Catalog as a Leader.
Guest: Has no access to the Control Panel. Areas within the Organization can be made available to Guests by a Leader.

By default, Organizations are available to participants unless the Organization Leader decides to make it unavailable.

Supporting Student Success Through Various Services

Learning Support Services

Learning Support Services offers a variety of programs and services to support students’ goals at any point in their college career. The Remote Learning Center is available for tutoring and writing support by appointment, with consultants working with each visitor for approximately one hour at a time. Learning Support Services and the Bradner Library also offer free snacks while students study, providing a welcoming environment for homework, study groups, or consultations with Academic Success Coaches.

Library Resources

The Library provides access to many of the key academic resources needed to further education. College librarians are available to help support instructional and information-seeking needs. Schoolcraft students, faculty, and staff can access library databases from off-campus through Blackboard by clicking the “Organizations” tab.

Career Services

The Career Mentorship and Placement Office and the Library present Career Information Sessions, exploring a wide variety of career resources and tools to guide career moves. Students, alumni, and community members with prior professional experience looking to enhance their current resume, cover letter, or interview preparation, or seeking job search strategies can meet one-on-one with a Career Success Navigator by appointment. Students and alumni have unlimited access to these services, with 30-minute appointments available via Microsoft Teams or in person.

Promoting Student Engagement and Campus Involvement

Schoolcraft College offers a vibrant campus life with numerous opportunities for students to get involved. These activities are often promoted and coordinated through Blackboard Learn organizations.

Clubs and Organizations

Phi Theta Kappa: An educational presentation that focuses on boosting academic success through research. Pizza will be provided.
Business Club: A personalized tour with Schoolcraft President Dr.
Edgerunners Ski and Snowboarding Club: A night at Mt. Brighton with discounted tickets.
ENV Club: An enchanting full moon hike through Maybury State Park and a Maybury Farm Maple Syrup Tour.

Events

Schoolcraft Basketball vs St.: Join the Schoolcraft Ocelots as they take on St. Clair CC. Admission is $5.
Mocktail Party featuring The Moving Forward Mini Expo: An event hosted by the Student Activities Office. Students, faculty, staff, and community members are invited to attend upcoming events with coffee, tea, and snacks, along with an educational presentation and informal conversation with peers from various cultures around the world.
Multicultural Fair: An annual event featuring cultural displays, performances, language demonstrations, international foods, and more.
Food Waste Awareness Event: An event to explore how small changes can make a big impact toward a more sustainable future.

Other Activities

Schoolcraft Connection: Hiring writers, photographers, and videographers to join the team.
Student Food Pantry: Providing food for students who self-identify that they need this service. Students can visit the pantry twice a month to pick up two bags of food.

Ensuring Academic Integrity with SafeAssign

SafeAssign is a plagiarism prevention tool integrated into Blackboard Learn that detects unoriginal content in students' papers by identifying areas of overlap between submitted assignments and existing works. It helps students identify how to properly attribute sources rather than paraphrase without giving credit to the original source.

How SafeAssign Works

SafeAssign is based on a unique text matching algorithm capable of detecting both exact and inexact matches between a submitted paper and a particular source material. Faculty have the option to Exclude Submissions when creating an Assignment, allowing students to "check their work" against SafeAssign sources prior to submitting a final version without subsequently revised drafts being flagged as matching the previous "draft" submissions.

File Compatibility

Assignments accept every possible file type as an attachment to a submission. However, SafeAssign will only process and create Originality Reports for attachments with compatible file types: .docx, .doc, .pdf, .txt, .odt, .rtf, .html, .htm, and .zip (processing files that match any of these file types within the .zip). Learn Assignment's Inline Grading feature only supports the following subset of file types: .pptx, .ppt, .xlsx, .xls, .docx, .doc, and .pdf. For unsupported file types, the SafeAssign Originality Report will omit a matching score. It is recommended that users only include numbers, letters, hyphens, and underscores in their filenames.

Originality Report

After a paper has been processed, an Originality Report will be available that will show the percentage of text in the submitted paper that matches existing sources. It also shows the suspected sources of each section of the submitted paper that returns a match. The faculty can then delete matching sources from the report and process it again. The sentence matching scores represent the percentage probability that two phrases have the same meaning. The overall score is an indicator of what percentage of the submitted paper matches existing sources.

Interpreting SafeAssign Scores

Scores below 15 percent: These papers typically include some quotes and few common phrases or blocks of text that match other documents.
Scores between 15 percent and 40 percent: These papers include extensive quoted or paraphrased material or they may include plagiarism.
Scores over 40 percent: There is a very high probability that text in this paper was copied from other sources.

Transitioning to Learn Ultra

Grand Valley State University (GVSU) has been preparing for a university-wide adoption of Bb Learn Ultra. The move from Bb Learn Original to Bb Learn Ultra has been an incredible opportunity to create new faculty support models, redesign training efforts, and develop strategies for internal and external communications.

Benefits of Learn Ultra

Program faculty became Ultra early adopters and eLearning champions.
Leverage the impending LMS change to collaborate on course development and to reinforce instructional design best practices.

Considerations for Transitioning to Ultra

As institutions launch their Transition-to-Ultra planning, it is important to consider items that are not often mentioned in the migration discussion but are details that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Data-Driven Decision Making

In life and work, we are often inundated with data from which interpretation of that data should inform and lead to decision-making. Anthology's Professional Services Consulting Data Solutions team shares key strategies to help session participants consider how they can review current approaches to the data collected or not collected in their areas and how to develop a data strategy framework that can help them identify, gather, review, and use for decision making. This includes a best practices checklist for creating an institutional data strategy framework, the role of data governance within the institution, understanding data quality, and identifying the role and drivers for gathering, reviewing, and using the data. The role of Learn and the data it contains for its various users will be situated in this broader institutional data strategy.

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