Explore the New Blackboard Gradebook: Recorded Demo and Key Features | Blackboard Ultra

Get to Know the New Blackboard Gradebook

The Blackboard Gradebook has a refreshed experience designed to make common grading tasks easier to find and complete.

In this recorded session, Gina Catenazzo and Jamie Arfin, Senior Instructional Designers in the Teaching & Learning Centre, walk through the updated Gradebook and demonstrate how its new layout brings more grading and student-management tools together in one place.

Watch the recording below for a guided tour of the new Gradebook and its key features.

What’s New?

While the way assessments are created and set up has not changed, the Gradebook grid experience has been redesigned. Think of it as a more centralized command centre where you can access many of the tools you need without repeatedly leaving the Gradebook.

Some of the changes demonstrated in the recording include:

• A simplified Gradebook navigation: Switch between the Grid and List views more easily.
• Course To Do list: Quickly see submissions that need grading and grades that need posting.
• Courses To Do list: From the main Courses area, see assessments across your courses that are overdue, due today or due soon.
• Updated Gradebook settings: Sort students by first or last name, show or hide student ID numbers, and access Gradebook upload and download options from the Settings panel.
• Assessment information panel: Select an assessment to open a panel containing due dates, visibility settings, categories, attempts and other useful information.
• Quick student reminders: Send a reminder to students who have not yet submitted an assessment.
• Easier access to accommodations and exceptions: View accommodations and manage assessment-specific exceptions and exemptions directly from the Gradebook.
• Student details at a glance: Open an individual student's panel to view submission details, feedback and other assessment information.
• Grader notes: Add private notes about a student that are not visible to the student.
• Direct grade entry: Enter grades directly into a Gradebook column, which can be especially useful for activities where students do not submit anything through Blackboard.
• Faster navigation: Move between students and assessments directly from the Gradebook panels.

More Control Over Overall Grade Calculations

The session also demonstrates a newer Overall Grade option that provides greater control over how a student's current grade is calculated and displayed.

Depending on your course needs, the Overall Grade can be based on:

• the points earned from items that have already been graded, or
• the student's accumulated points compared with the total possible points for the course.

The recording demonstrates how changing this setting can significantly affect the grade students see during the semester.

A More Centralized Grading Experience

One of the biggest benefits of the updated Gradebook is that more tasks can now be completed directly from the Gradebook itself. Faculty can access submissions, provide feedback, add notes, manage exceptions, enter grades and post grades with fewer steps.

The List view and assessment setup processes remain largely unchanged, so many familiar Blackboard workflows will continue to work as before.

Watch the full recording above to see these features demonstrated step by step.

Have questions? The Teaching & Learning Centre is available to support faculty with Blackboard Gradebook questions and workflows.