Blackboard upgrade on May 4

Technology notification:

On May 4th, from 6-9 a.m., Blackboard Learn will be upgraded to Learn 9.1 Q4 2016 Cumulative Update 1. During the scheduled maintenance, Blackboard will be unavailable. Please review your courses and organizations in Blackboard prior to the upgrade to ensure everything is working as expected and you are familiar with the changes. You can evaluate the Blackboard updates in our test environment at https://bbtst.grcc.edu (on campus only). The test environment is a copy of the production environment as of February 1.

With this upgrade, the new Blackboard Learn 2016 theme will be applied, so it will look slightly different. The new theme improves the experience for mobile users. Additionally, this theme was designed with WCAG 2.0 principles in mind and follows accessibility guidelines for structure, color contrast, and navigation. Please note, modifying course themes and some branding configuration settings are no longer supported. The course themes option will be replaced with the Blackboard delivered theme, which is a more consistent, mobile-friendly and accessible interface. In addition, we added a “Mobile” tab that contains a different module layout that we believe better aligns with the mobile experience (i.e. My Course List module resides on the left, so it is the first module presented to a mobile device). More information on this can be found in the announcement section located on the login page. The Mobile tab will not be pushed to production and is only used for demonstration purposes. We welcome your feedback on adjusting the layout of various modules to improve the overall mobile experience.

Listed below are a couple of the feature enhancements and quality improvements in this release. For a full list of updates, please refer to the Blackboard release notes, which can be found at https://en-us.help.blackboard.com/Learn/Administrator/Hosting/Release_Notes/Release_Notes_All_91_Releases/Release_Notes_9.1_2016_Q4.

• Improved mobile experience and accessibility
• Ability to drag and drop files
• Submission receipts
• Reminders
• Dropbox integration

If you have questions or concerns, please contact IT Customer Support at 234-HELP or ITSupport@grcc.edu. If you have questions about how to use the new features, contact DLIT at 234-3205 or DLIT@grcc.edu.