Book Image

Blackboard Essentials for Teachers

By : William Rice
Book Image

Blackboard Essentials for Teachers

By: William Rice

Overview of this book

Blackboard is the world's most popular commercial learning management system. With Blackboard you can construct and deliver professional quality elearning courses with ease. Its many features, which allow you to manage courses, grading and assessments, and social collaboration, are the standard against which other learning management systems are measured. Blackboard Essentials for Teachers shows you how to use Blackboard's most essential features by guiding you through the development of a demonstration course, built on Blackboard's free site for teachers, coursesites.com. You will also learn more about Blackboard's most important features, such as the gradebook, using clear instructions to guide you every step of the way. By following an example course, this book will guide you, step-by-step, through creating your own Blackboard course. Start by adding static material for students to view, such as pages, links, and media. Then, add interaction to your courses, with discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Most importantly, engage your students in your course by communicating with them, assessing them, and putting them into groups. Blackboard Essentials for Teachers will enable you to take your elearning course from inception, to construction, to delivery.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Blackboard Essentials for Teachers
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Random blocks versus question sets


While creating a test, you can choose to add a random block of questions, and/or a question set. Both features enable you to add a group of questions all at once. However, they meet different teaching needs.

Before we talk about the difference between a question set and random block, let's look at the similarities:

  • Both consist of a group of questions that you specify

  • In both cases, when you add them to a test, you specify how many of the questions from the group the test should display

  • Both give you an easy way to add a specific group of questions to a test, to randomize questions, and to reuse that group of questions on other tests

What is the difference then? Simply put, the main difference between random blocks and question sets, is the source of their questions.

Question pools, the source for random blocks

A question pool is a group of questions that are chosen from the course. You can filter the questions using multiple criteria. In the following screenshot...