CSULB’s Office of Academic Technology Services and BeachBoard Services staff recently upgraded BeachBoard from version 6.3 to version 7.3. While this is a major upgrade, you and your students won’t notice much of a difference. In fact, the only significant difference you will notice is to BeachBoard’s Discussion Board tool.

To ensure that this upgrade does not interrupt summer semester instruction, the University has set up this separate BeachBoard server specifically for summer 2008 courses. Shortly after Memorial Day, BeachBoard’s login page will be updated to provide links to access the summer BeachBoard server (the server that contains summer 2008 courses) and the main BeachBoard server (the server that contains courses from spring 2008 and earlier semesters). While this summer BeachBoard server will remain up and running throughout the summer, the main BeachBoard server will be unavailable between June 16 and June 30 for upgrades.

The following tells you what has and has not changed in BeachBoard 7.3.

What has NOT changed

If you know how to use BeachBoard, you already know how to use BeachBoard 7.3. BeachBoard’s layout, tabs, color scheme, course design, and even course control panel layout remain the same. The tools you use to upload your syllabus and course documents, create assignments, add links to websites, add announcements, send emails, grade your students, and so on remain unchanged.

The Digital Drop box has been replaced by the Assignments tool that lets instructors

• Collect assignments, homework, or essays from the students
• Track the students' assignment completion status
• Batch download and view the students' work
• Provide students with individualized feedback on their work
• Assign each student a grade for his or her work.

BeachBoard's Assignments Tool also automatically creates an item for each assignment in BeachBoard’s Gradebook. Select the following hyperlink to view instructions on how to use BeachBoard's Assignments Tool [this hyperlink opens a new window].

BeachBoard 7.3’s discussion board has been completely redesigned. In particular, the new Discussion Board

• Is easier to navigate and search
• Allows instructors to assign grades for their students' posts
• Enables instructors to tag particular posts with text labels for easier sorting and filtering
• Lets users subscribe to Discussion Board threads
• Gives users the opportunity to automatically quote other posts in their replies
• Enable students to peer review and rate other students' posts using a five star system

Select the following hyperlink to view a movie that demonstrates how to use BeachBoard's new Discussion Board [this hyperlink opens a new window].

BeachBoard 7.3 offers an Early Warning System that lets instructors proactively measure and monitor student performance based on key performance metrics. Instructors can define rules that monitor for both positive and negative trends. Rules are defined against three key performance metrics within a course:

1. Item Score/Grade
2. Item Due Date
3. Course Attendance

Select the following hyperlink to view a movie that demonstrates how to use BeachBoard's new Early Warning System [this hyperlink opens a new window].

Minor Changes

Assessments

• BeachBoard 7.3’s Test Manager supports extra credit questions. The points possible for the entire test will not include the points possible for an extra credit question. If the question is answered correctly, the question points will be added to the points correct, but if the question is answered incorrectly, there is no score penalty.
• BeachBoard 7.3 assessments may be set to allow unlimited attempts or a specific number of attempts. The Gradebook will display all of the attempts. The Gradebook item is scored based on one of five different grading options: last attempt, first attempt, highest score, lowest score, or average of scores. Additionally, an Override field has been included so that the instructor can override the score independent of any attempts.
• BeachBoard 7.3 gives instructors the option of deploying their tests as self-assessments rather than as graded tests. Instructors can choose whether the instructor and student can view the self-assessment grade or only the student can view the grade. In either case, self-assessment grades are not included in the students’ final score calculation.
• BeachBoard 7.3 allows instructors to import and export tests and surveys. In previous versions of BeachBoard, only pools could be imported and exported.
• BeachBoard 7.3 ungroups BeachBoard assessment feedback options. Instructors will be able to select any combination of the score, submitted answers, correct answers and feedback to be displayed to the student at the end of an assessment.

Announcements

• When you add an announcement to your BeachBoard 7.3 course, you have the option of automatically broadcasting an email copy of that announcement to your students.

Course Availability

• BeachBoard 7.3 shows students a list of all of the courses in which they are enrolled, not just a list of the courses that have been made available by the instructors. Instructors must still manually make their courses available before the students can access that course’s content.

Discussion Board

• BeachBoard 7.3 allows instructors to copy a discussion board forum from one course to another.
• BeachBoard 7.3 allows users to subscribe to discussion board threads. When a new post is added to the thread, BeachBoard will automatically send an email to that thread’s subscribers.
• BeachBoard 7.3’s discussion boards support adaptive release and other availability rules such as date set.
• BeachBoard 7.3 lets instructor “lock” a forum to prevent additional posts but to also allow users to read existing threads. This feature replaces “Add Archive” tool.

Email

• BeachBoard 7.3 adds support for HTML-formatted messages.

E-Portfolios

• BeachBoard 7.3’s portfolio tools allow users to customize colors, fonts, background images, and overall content layout beyond the classic frame-based presentation of BeachBoard’s original e-portfolio tool.

File Sizes and Capacity

• BeachBoard 7.3 lets users upload single files as large as 20 megabytes. By way of comparison, a 20 megabyte file is 40 times larger than the size of an average PowerPoint file and would take over five minutes to download over a typical DSL connection and over three quarters of an hour to download over the fastest dial-up connection. [If you need to upload a single file that is larger than 20 megabytes, please contact BeachBoard Services.]
• There is no limit on the number of files you can upload to BeachBoard 7.3.

Gradebook

• BeachBoard 7.3’s Gradebook provides instructors with the option of hiding the class average from the students.
• BeachBoard 7.3 allows instructors to add and store optional notes or explanations with each grade that is visible to students. A comment can be added for any attempt associated with the grade, using a simple, spell-check-only text area.
• BeachBoard 7.3’s Gradebook Date field has been relabeled Due Date and will no longer be required for Gradebook Items.
• BeachBoard 7.3’s Gradebook places additional space before and after the !, ?, and – indicators making it easier for instructors to click on those indicators.

Locale/Languages

• BeachBoard 7.3 supports multibyte characters and right-to-left languages. Instructors will be able to change the default language for their course buttons, titles, and other system-applied text from English to Japanese, simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Arabic, and Hebrew. Instructors will also continue to be able to change their course’s default language to Deutsch (German), Español (Spanish), Français (French), Italiano (Italian), Nederlands (Dutch), and Português (Portuguese).