MELA Meeting Minutes 2003 - 2017

e. Building Blocks. When a building block is installed on the system, it is available to all colleges. We need group consensus before adding a building block to the system. When testing building blocks, we need to make sure that the faculty know that it is not permanent. If we limit the building blocks, we’ll have better control of the system. Tish said that maybe we should create a policy that says that we must request building blocks before adding them to the LMS. Krista suggested that building block requests should be sent to the Support sub-committee and they will present the building blocks to the ELCs for approval. Everyone agreed. From now on, building block requests should be sent to the chair of the Support sub-committee. f. MELO. MSVCC helps pay for MELO services. The Library Services (MELO Committee) comes to Christian with an amount that MSVCC must pay for MELO. We pay $125,000 a year for MELO. g. SP8. Blackboard is here to present SP8. After the upgrade is complete, the ELCs will receive access to the system before the public. COLLEGE_Main brand should be changed to BB2012 theme, if wanted. Otherwise the theme will look like the old theme. DO NOT make any changes to the DEFAULT brand, this will change it for everyone. Christian will leave it up to the ELCs to decide when to make it available. We will be able to manually make items available through our System Admin, using an Excel spreadsheet. Turn off the snapshot on May 19 th and Blackboard will be available on the 22 nd . h. Collaborate and Presidium contracts will expire soon. So we will need to discuss whether we would like to renew those contracts. If so, Christian would like to have the contract dates to be the same time as the LMS contract. i. Blackboard Presentation. i. Test answers and point values. Can update the test question answer and point value when the test has already been deployed and used by students. ii. Interact with rubrics through the Needs Grading feature. iii. Course-to-Course Navigation. Instructors can move from one course to the next. If the instructor is on the Course Information page and wants to move to another course onto the same page, then he/she will use the Course-to-Course Navigation option. iv. Course Reports. There are 3 new course reports: 1. Course Performance-see how the students are performing in the class. Goals are setup by System Admins. 2. Student Overview-specific to the students. It shows where they have been in the course specifically, days and times the student is spending in the course, and also shows in which course content area. v. Auto-save for quizzes (students). If you don’t set Force Completion, students can start where they stopped. You can also give the student an additional attempt. It saves the answer after the student selects it and it also saves essay answers as well. The students will not have to select the Save button anymore. It allows the instructor the option to stop the test at the time limit or not. vi. Select All button for Course Copy and Export/Archive. There is now the option to Select All when doing a Course Copy or Export. vii. Merge tool is setup by the System Admin. The merge tool is located under Courses. You will select the courses that you want to merge into the Parent course. Master(Parent) Course select edit button and select “ Child Courses” so that enrollments will be merged into the Parent Course. viii. Building Blocks. You can change the option to turn the building blocks off/on for each college. This will allow Christian to turn the building block on for specific colleges and turn it off for the colleges that don’t want a specific building block. ix. Online Resources. Blackboardlearn.com/new will show all the new SP8 features and ondemand.blackboard.com shows the 2012 themes. Help.blackboard.com-for students,

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