Creating Assignments
This document describes how instructors and teachers' assistants can use the Assignments feature in Blackboard gradebook to organize and grade electronic submissions from students.
You can create an assignment link in any of the Content Areas of your class (the area named "Assignments" might be the best place). For more on organizing and managing content, see documentation on Managing the Course Menu.
Assignments vs. SafeAssign
Both features allow you to accept documents online (e.g. student papers, projects). The Assignments feature is older, and currently more stable. Blackboard added the SafeAssign feature during the summer of 2007, and it seems to work really well except for a small number of students (students with non-standard browsers, or who use the newest version of Microsoft Word).
Using SafeAssign has the added benefit that it does plagiarism detection for you. This document describes Assignments only. For SafeAssing, see Using SafeAssign.
Add Assignment
Go to a content area (through Control Panel, or by clicking Edit View within a folder). Along the top bar, select Assignment, then click Go:
On the next page, you will be able to enter details about this assignment. This works just like adding any other content item (see documentation), except there's a place for Points Possible.
You can use the text area to give students instructions and you can upload a file if students need something to start with or your instructions are in a Word document.
Once you click Submit, Blackboard will create the item in your folder and add a column in your gradebook. Therefore, you should add your assignments to Blackboard before you add items to the gradebook and weight the semester grades.
Students Submit Assignments
Next, you wait for students to submit their assignments. You can refer them to "Submitting Assignments on Blackboard". Basically, they click on the View/Complete link and upload their document:
Students can only complete the assignment once. After they submit the assignment, they can click on the link to view the grade and any response that you may have posted.
If a student needs to re-submit an assignment, an instructor or teachers' assistant will need to click the Clear Attempt button (see picture below, in next section) so they can try again.
Grading Submitted Assignments
After a student has submitted their assignment, it will show up as an exclamation point in your gradebook. Click on the little exclamation point to see details and enter a grade:
Click the View button for more details, and to download the submitted document:
On the next page, you can click on the link in section 2 to view or download the student's file. In section 3, you can enter a Grade which will go directly into your gradebook. The Comments section will be available to the student, if they check their grade. Anything you write in the Instructor Notes section is private, not visible to the students. In each of these sections, you can upload files. (For example, if you want to give a revised document back to the student).
It can be tedious to look through each student's work this way. An alternative is to download all of the assignments at once, through the gradebook. Go to the main gradebook view (through Control Panel), (1) click on the name of the assignment at the top of the column, (2) click Item Download, then (3) select which to download, and click Submit. After you read and grade all the assignments, you can click Item Grade List to enter all the grades at once.
Back to Blackboard Overview.
To read about SafeAssign, a similar feature, see Using SafeAssign.