As Blackboard develops the GUI for future releases, including the Ultra Experience (navigation scheme), they need to understand how their client institutions are using tabs and modules, along with institution roles, to target information delivery and "branding." This is a forum to post your use cases, and to explain what you are doing to assign institution roles and associate them with brands, themes, tabs, modules and whatever else.
For now we're showing everyone the same theme/brand, which is customized from Blackboard's 2016 theme to update colors, control institutional branding, and apply a few fixes that we've picked up along the way.
Rather than modifying Blackboard's theme files directly, I "append" additional CSS files that contain my customizations -- it's easier that way to keep track of our own changes, and to apply updates when Blackboard releases a new theme.
Our accounts are managed by an Identity and Access Management system (IAM) which sets each user's primary institution role as either Student, Faculty, or Staff, which will determine whether that user sees a Student Home, Faculty Home, or Staff Home tab when they log in. These tabs are mostly the same, with links to My Bb Learn Courses, campus resources, mobile app download links, etc., with the exception of targeted support links and announcement modules for each group.
Currently we are using Institutional Hierarchy to control tool access (especially for pilots, or where a tool's use should otherwise be limited), and to supplement our reporting by associating courses in the LMS to specific departments and colleges. We've talked about delegating some administration tasks to departments so that they can manage their own courses/users/etc., but so far that's not something we have tried.
We have 23 member colleges within a single Blackboard instance. Each college has its own brand (driven by institutional role) and each brand can choose the theme to use, so while many are on 2016, some are still on 2012. Within that, they have their own look and feel customizations (logos, colors, etc). We switched to the 2016 icon set when a majority of our colleges had switched to the 2016 theme. They also each have their own home tab (also driven by institutional role) and sets of modules (ditto).
We also have some shared tabs (e.g. one for students; a help tab; a library tab; etc.) but with modules on those that are selectively visible via institutional roles. Some tabs are personalizable, some are not.
The data suggests that those tabs don't see much traffic, but are used. I've wondered about an approach based on users having a non-personalizable "MyCollege" tab and a personalizable "MyStuff" tab.
I have a tab called Faculty Resources where I have a collection of trainings that my department offers, messages that I send out, alerts, and resources that link elsewhere. We have a Student Resources tab with sub-tabs. We just created a Starfish tab with information on that specific product.
We use a lot of different Modules that are set to specific roles (Faculty/Staff and Students) that allow us to target the audience. Some modules are for informational purposes from Blackboard and some are used to get certain messages out, and some are shortcuts to third-party single sign on.
Mike
Michael,
Love this idea! Would you be willing to share screen shots of how you setup your Faculty tab resources?
Thank you kindly,
Eddie Andreo
AVP for Distance Education
Bellevue University. Bellevue, Nebraska
Currently Bb 9.1 Q2 2016 CU3. We will be updating to Bb 9.1 Q2 2016 CU3 on October 1, 2017. We will also be transitioning to Bb SaaS (Continuous Delivery), Dec 2017. We have several ways that we are utilizing the Tab and Module functions within Blackboard.
This is to just name a few.
Thank you,
Alicia
City College Norwich, UK - large FE/HE college (community college), currently running Q2 2017 CU3 MH
We use Institutional Roles to give users access to relevant tabs; we split our user population as below:
Staff and students are profiled on creation through SIS integration, whilst External Users are manually created.
We're aware of the ability to have different themes for different institutional roles, and have experimented with this in the past but haven't used this "in anger".
Hi Alicia,
We are just starting to use Tabs and Modules, I noticed in your post you said you modules on your login page, how do you do that?
Hi Frances,
I apologize for my late response!
You would create the module that you would like to be displayed on the Welcome Page (whatever you named your Top Frame Tab). Once this is created, you would navigate over to the Tabs screen and locate the proper Top Frame for your Login page. Within the Top Frames are tabs, click the chevron located next to the tab name. You should see a menu popup, click Default Content. This will take you to a list of all available modules that you created. Locate the module you created for the Login page and set it to display then click submit.
Now from the same Tab menu click Default layout. You are able to depict where you would like this module to be placed on the page. I am more than happy to walk you through this process if you would like. You can contact me at williams@bellevue.edu and we can set up a Collaborate Session. Just let me know!
Thank you,
Alicia
Hello Everyone!
A lot of great feedback here! My name is Ali Ganjalizadeh (aka Ali G.) and I am the Learn Product Manager working on the Tabs & Modules replacement features in Learn Ultra. The two Ultra features that this correlates to are Targeted Notifications & the Institution Page. The former is already available in Ultra with Sys Admin credentials, the latter is most likely going to be pushed out to Ultra enabled environments in late October. After reading all the great use-cases here, I am confident that our roadmap for these features will hit the majority of them. I would like to host a Collaborate session where I show you the current implementation of these features as well as share some near-term roadmap on what you can expect to come next. I would like to schedule this session at some point between Sept 27 - October 4. If you are interested in joining and providing feedback, please reply with your preferred email address so I can send you an invite. If you wish you email me instead of posting here, you can reach me at ali.ganjalizadeh@blackboard.com. I am looking forward to our discussion!
Thank you,
Ali G.
These are our tabs:
We use tabs that open URLs and apps.
We have a number of modules that work with our building blocks to do things like adding department staff to all their courses for the semester or allowing librarians and help desk personnel to have temporary access to a course.
We use HTML modules to target different groups, such as all the incoming students or all the faculty.
We have our own version of the My Courses module that we can't do away with until if and when we are completely on Ultra, as users with courses in both Bb worlds will need access points.
Thanks,
Dennis
Thanks, Dennis Hood, for this information. Sounds like you are making great use of the tabs and modules. As I was reading your post, I realized that I have not heard nearly as much about this topic as I would like to hear.
I wonder, Marissa Dimino if Dennis and some other folks who are using the tabs in useful ways may be willing to do a brief summary in one or more venues? Office Hours? Bb World? Other venues?
We assign primary, and most secondary roles from our student records and HR systems: School and/or departmental affiliation, Staff / Student, undergraduate / postgraduate etc.
School is used as the primary role, for both staff and students, and users see a different tab when they log in, depending on which School they are in. Staff in the schools update essential information here - generally information which sits above the course level. Subject Librarians and Careers Advisers also update School-specific info on these tabs. Often the tab is used to link to relevant files / folders in the Content Collection, or to Organisations e.g. Placement info for Psychology students.
Additionally, we have Support for Staff and Support for Student tabs which either pull in, or link to, information from our support websites.
There's already some concern that students using the app don't see any of the information on these tabs (nor, in the new Blackboard app, do they see content from Organisations).
When we eventually move to Ultra, we will definitely want to be able to continue to provide information which is targeted to specific groups of users, over and above what they get on courses. Some of that may be possible through targeted notifications, but there's also a lot of more static information which currently sits on Blackboard tabs - if we were to lose those, we would have to find another platform to host them on.
Hi,
Rhode Island College, Managed Hosted, 7k FTE, 9.1 Q2 2016
We have institution roles assigned as either faculty or staff or both with our flatfile SIS integration with PS. We kept the main login page the same (Institution) but added various targeted modules to student and faculty. We also created a faculty resources tab that contain more specific information on the various announcements we make on the "Important Updates" module on the main page, as well as other resources and tools that are available. We are currently working on one for students as well.
This model has actually worked very well for us over the last two years. I'm thinking of adding perhaps school specific modules that the individual departments can manage as that information is in our feed but haven't figured that one out yet.
We are on Q4 2016 CU3 and have 5 separate TAFE colleges that use our single Bb Instance. The end user goes to a different URL, sees different tabs / modules but yet is going to the same centrally hosted (load balanced) server. Using Institution Roles, Categories, Domains and hierarchy each of the TAFE admins only has access to their own courses / users that belong to their Institution.
Every night the SIS runs and creates/updates users with the correct Primary Institution Role.
Additionally we have started a large roll out of the Content Collection and the permissions for the top 4 folders are governed by Institution Roles. So if the user doesn't have the correct (secondary) Institution Role then they can't see/access that content.
What I would love is for Institution Roles to be assigned to a user via API.
Hello Everyone,
The calendar invite has been sent out for this meeting (as explained in my previous post) - October 17th @ 10:00 am ET.
If you are interested in joining the session, please add your email address in the comments or reach out to me directly, ali.ganjalizadeh@blackboard.com
Looking forward to the conversation!
Thank you,
Ali G.
Southern Cross University, Lismore, NSW Australia - using Q4 2016
Like most others, we use different tabs to deliver separate components according to their primary institution role. Students have a single tab, but multiple subtabs.
Staff have multiple tabs and also are able to see how students view their learning environment using the mySCU hub tab. Modules are also delivered based on primary and secondary institution roles.
External users have different themes, tabs and modules based on their primary institution roles. Most of the current themes are based on the old 2012 theme, but we are currently modifying the 2016 theme to replace all of those.
Thank you for everyone that was able to join the Collaborate session. For those of you that missed it, here is the recording.
Please continue to provide feedback on how you use tabs & modules, especially if your use case is not covered in our roadmap plans.
Thank you,
Ali
Note, some of the items on the recording are in early development or have not yet started development and are subject to change.
Statements regarding our product development initiatives, including new products and future product upgrades, updates or enhancements represent our current intentions, but may be modified, delayed or abandoned without prior notice and there is no assurance that such offering, upgrades, updates or functionality will become available unless and until they have been made generally available to our customers.
We are currently on SaaS and looking to implement the Ultra Experience over Christmas break...
We have an extensive Student Resource tab that I can see being built as the Institutional Page... When will the Institutional Page be available?
We have several departments that have built out tabs for their students. From the video I gathered that it is on the Road Map to do similar things whether it is additional Institutional Pages or modules within the Institutional Page released to specific departments. How far off are these from being available?
I hate that the only issue we are looking at going to the Ultra experience is loosing these functions that we have spent a year encouraging departments to use and several have done so and love it!
Thank you
Hi Dee,
Can you please shoot me an email and we can discuss Institution Page specific to your school's needs? ali.ganjalizadeh@blackboard.com.
Thank you!
-Ali
We use tabs and modules to deliver academic material to a set of students and professors trough Institutional Roles, in Holydays Break we will move from Self Hosted Classic Experience to SaaS Ultra Experience, ¿How can we replicate this functionality? is very important to our organization.
Thank You!
Hi Enrique,
Great news on moving to SaaS! Just to clarify some items, moving to SaaS does not mean the same thing as enabling the Ultra experience. There are three decisions that each institution needs to make when it comes to Ultra,
For #2 - we have a whole checklist of changes that you can expect. Please contact your CSA/AE and they will set up a meeting with my Product Management team to go through the checklist and see how each change would or would not impact your specific institution. The loss of Tabs and Modules is just one of those changes.
For #3 - This is another conversation you can have your your CSA/AE (and Product Management) team to understand when it makes sense for you to start rolling out Ultra at the course level. We want to make sure there are no surprises and everybody is ready for the change.
Back to you original question around Tabs & Modules replacement in Ultra, please scroll up in this thread to my post from
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Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, KY. 16,000 students, 1200 faculty/staff/designers/etc.
Currently Bb 9.1 Q2 2016. We are transitioning to Bb SaaS (Continuous Delivery), due for Spring 2018.
At Eastern Kentucky University, we have used branding to customize the top frame image and the main tabs seen by four different communities of users. We assign the primary institution role when accounts are created, from SIS or batch user creation file, and manually adjust them when users complain that they do not have the right brand. After a user logs in, the landing page contains a module for system announcements, My Courses, My Organizations, My Announcements, and any other modules targeted to that user's institution role(s). We use secondary institution roles to control the availability of about a dozen modules on various tabs, such as the modules for course evaluations, where the modules to be shown to instructors and students are completely different. Our help desk staff have both a specific system role (to grant privileges to the System Admin tab) and a special institution role (to provide them with a tab for information about their responsibilities). We do not currently use the institutional hierarchy, and we have made very few customizations to the 2012 Theme.