Hi,
My questions are these:
- In the Release Notes for Q4, there's talk of grades journey and grades reporting. Are these limited to PowerSchool SIS? Or would they be compatible with Banner?
- The "Goals Performance Dashboard" - is this replacing the current "Performance Dashboard"? Does it require use of Alignments? Or am I completely misunderstanding how this component works?
Thank you!
Hi John
The 2015 Q4 release includes the Grades Journey which enables the more effective and efficient management of grades data between Learn and any SIS (including Banner). https://en-us.help.blackboard.com/Learn/SaaS/Administrator/Deployment/Integrations/Grades_Journey
Blackboard provide a service "Blackboard Enhanced Grades Journey implementation service" which they strongly recommend, though it's not mandatory.
Info about the goals performance dashboard is here: Goal Performance Dashboard - Blackboard Help
It's not a replacement for the performance dashboard.
From my testing you have to have set up institutional goals before you can use it. I would be interested to see examples of how other institutions have used it. From my point of view it appears tricky for large institutions to implement since finding common goals across all subject areas would be challenging, and I wonder if it is possible. Those goals then have to be mapped into every course. I may be misunderstanding it, so I would like to see a post by any large institution (especially of interest for me would be a UK institution) about how they are using it, with some concrete examples. To me it seems to be a very large undertaking to be able to get use out of it, but may well support smaller K12/secondary school institutions, or professional training/military training colleges etc where they might have a smaller more specific set of institutional goals. Again I could just be really mis-understanding this.