News
Guidance on AI Detection and Why We’re Disabling Turnitin’s AI Detector
Aug. 16, 2023—In April of this year, Turnitin released an update to their product that reviewed submitted papers and presented their determination of how much of a paper was written by AI. As we outlined at that time, many people had important concerns and questions about this new tool, namely how the product exactly works and how...
Turnitin’s New AI Writing Detection (and what it means for your teaching)
Apr. 4, 2023—Effective August 16, 2023, Vanderbilt has disabled Turnitin’s AI detection tool. To read more about why this decision was made, refer to this newer blog post. Beginning on 4/4/2023, faculty who use Turnitin now have access to an additional tool – Artificial Intelligence (AI) Writing Detection. There is no denying that artificial intelligence has...
Grading Center Feature: Returning Assignments to Students
Oct. 5, 2016—The Grade Center provides useful features to keep track of student grades, customize the Grade Center to your course, and provide students feedback on their work. Recently, Blackboard support has fielded several questions from instructors about how to upload graded documents for students to view feedback within the Grade Center — even when the document...
SIPX: A Blackboard-Integrated Tool for Copyright Compliance in Course Readings
Sep. 16, 2016—You may have heard about SIPX, a tool recently acquired by the Vanderbilt Library to streamline the copyright compliance process for course readings. With the addition of SIPX to the Blackboard tool set, instructors now have the ability to find course readings themselves from the library holdings (or from other sources) and place the links...
Is Blackboard FERPA compliant?
Aug. 18, 2016—Here at Blackboard support, we often get questions from faculty and teaching assistants about Blackboard’s compliance with the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act, the federal law that governs the privacy of student educational records. The good news is that the guidelines that protect student privacy in your physical classroom work in much the same way...
Blackboard Support Summer Hours
May. 25, 2016—This summer the Blackboard support team will focus their support efforts from 7am to 4pm Monday through Friday. You can expect a fast and thorough response from our team whether you contact us by email or phone during those hours. We will continue providing support via email 4-11pm Sunday through Thursday, with an expected response...
Blackboard Upgrade Underway!
May. 21, 2016—You should have received emails alerting you to Blackboard’s upgrade this weekend, or you may have seen the announcement on the Blackboard log in page. That upgrade period is now underway. We expect Blackboard to be available to users again no later than 8pm on Sunday May 22. Updates about the upgrade status can be...
Campus Invited to Course Management System Vendor Demos in April
Apr. 11, 2016—The Center for Teaching invites Vanderbilt faculty, staff, and students to a series of product demonstrations by the three vendors under consideration for Vanderbilt’s next course management system (CMS). The demonstrations, along with feedback from those who attend them, will inform Vanderbilt’s decision to renew its contract with Blackboard, set to expire in 2017, or...
New Course Availability and Deletion Policy To Be Implemented May 2016
Apr. 5, 2016—The Center for Teaching, as the administrative home for Blackboard, is announcing a new Course Availability and Deletion Policy for Blackboard. This policy, recommended by Vanderbilt’s Blackboard implementation team and approved by the Blackboard Faculty Advisory Committee, is intended to reduce the amount of storage space Vanderbilt purchases annually from Blackboard, while also allowing most...
Complements to Blackboard: Constructing Effective Multiple Choice Questions
Feb. 8, 2016—Did you know that you can create tests or quizzes in Blackboard and have students take them online? The on-demand resources page of our website includes a guide to creating a test. The testing feature allows instructors to set up different types of questions, several of which are automatically graded. While Blackboard may help streamline the technical side...