SafeAssignment has been updated on our Blackboard server. SafeAssignment now contains a number of new features to streamline your workflow. Here are some quick notes, provided by the company.
1. Interface Enhancements:
a. New Quick Submit Functionality – Quick Submit functionality became independent of Blackboard Assignments, and now allows instructors to upload files for checking directly from their instructor accounts in a more intuitive manner. Also, the new Quick Submit feature supports organizing batch uploads into subfolders for higher convenience. (WRV NOTE: Files that you Quick Submit using the new Quick Submit tab in the MyDropBox Suite tool, are NOT associated with a specific course. They are your submissions and are shown in the Quick Submit tab of the MyDropBox Suite in ALL your courses. If you use this feature, I encourage you to use the New Folder box to create folders to organize your paper BEFORE you submit it.)
b. New Safe Assignment View page – the table displaying the list of submitted papers and available reports in SafeAssignment is now more compact with graphical icons instead of text links.
c. New View Paper Link – now instructors can view the text of student-submitted with all original formatting, meta-information about the paper, and student comments on one screen without downloading the file with the corresponding paper (downloading is also available).
d. New Grade Update Form in the Gradebook – now SafeAssignment reports and other SafeAssignment-related information can be viewed directly from the Grade Update form in the Blackboard Gradebook, making the grading process one-step, as opposed to the two-step process with SafeAssignment 1.x.
e. New Integrated Student View – now students can view assignment grade, instructor comments and SafeAssignment report in one integrated view.
f. Local Time Zone Support – SafeAssignment 2.0 uses local time zone of your Blackboard server for all time management within Blackboard (e.g. assignment availability dates & times, submission timestamps in Gradebook and Control Panel etc). Please note that there is still one place where submission timestamps are displayed in Eastern Standard Time – the headers of the reports (fix be fixed soon). All timestamps have time zone abbreviations attached to them to avoid any confusion.
g. Unfortunately, some of the expected and announced interface enhancements, such as progress bar display on big/slow report downloads or paper uploads, sorting Safe Assignment View table by submission time, and “What Is This” links next to some of the elements of SafeAssignment forms that may require extra explanation, were pushed back to version 2.1, which is due in February 2006. However, some of such interface enhancements will be added on the background without reinstallation of the SafeAssignment Building Block, and will appear automatically before the version 2.1 is released.
2. Integration with the MyDropBox Suite – (not relevant at UM) this version brings integration with the MyDropBox Suite Standalone and with the Re:Mark online grading and marking solution. Other products will be integrated later this spring. For more information on the MyDropBox Suite visit our updated Web site (http://www.MyDropBox.com/).
a. Re:Mark Integration – (not relevant at UM) Re:Mark online paper marking and grading system is offered to all current users of SafeAssignment at no extra cost only until August 2006 and is automatically enabled after upgrade to SafeAssignment 2.0. Any paper submitted to SafeAssignment can be commented on via Re:Mark right in Blackboard. However, due to temporary lack of training materials on Re:Mark, it is recommended to limit use of this tool to product reviews and evaluations. You can find more information on Re:Mark in the corresponding section of the MyDropBox Web site (http://www.mydropbox.com/services/remark.php). You can also preview Re:Mark enhancements planned for this spring - http://www.mydropbox.com/info/remark_demo.exe. Please forward to us any suggestions and/or feature requests regarding Re:Mark.
b. MyDropBox Suite Standalone Integration - (not relevant at UM) all changes committed by a user in the Blackboard interface, including all papers, grades and reports, will now be synchronized with the corresponding user’s account in the standalone version of the MyDropBox Suite, which makes parallel use of Blackboard-integrated and Standalone versions in one institution much easier. Standalone and Blackboard-integrated versions of the MyDropBox Suite now use one institutional database of submitted papers guaranteeing proper comparison of papers across two different versions of our services used within one institution. Please note that at this point synchronization of Courses and Assignments is offered in one direction only – from Blackboard to Standalone (i.e. Assignments registered in Standalone are not created in Blackboard, but Assignments created in Blackboard automatically appear in Standalone). Other (smaller) data units, such as reports, are synchronized bi-directionally.
3. Speed and Stability Enhancements:
a. Faster Paper Uploads and Report Downloads – on very fast connections, where data transfer speeds were limited by our servers, the throughput can increase by more than 5 times. Users with slower Internet connections should also experience noticeable speed increases.
b. Easy Copying of Courses with Safe Assignments – with SafeAssignment 1.x, copying a course (e.g. using one course as a template and “multiplying” it), would break connections between each new copy of the course and the corresponding database record in SafeAssignment system. This issue could be fixed by manually synchronizing each Safe Assignment in each new copy of a course. Now all Safe Assignments in a new copy of a course can by synchronized with one click (http://www.safeassignment.com/sync_course.pdf).
c. Numerous other stability enhancements and minor bug fixes.
Bill Vilberg
305-284-3949 (work); 786-218-3052 (cell); 305-255-9138 (home)
