Stuart Hepplestone attended the Blackboard Learn Product Management Workshop in Manchester back in November 2011. Blackboard Inc. are looking to the community for feedback and feature suggestions about their products and this event was one way in which we can learn about and influence upcoming developments, and share ideas with other Blackboard clients.

There are a number of changes being made to Blackboard as well as a bunch of new features being introduced over the next few years which academic staff can make use of in their learning and teaching, or are designed to simply make things easier. Some of these we will hopefully see after the summer upgrade, including:

• Grading Rubrics – the ability to create a Grading Rubric for any Grade Centre column. This can be made visible to students ahead of the task, and then used to provide feedback to each individual student about their performance on that task.
• Automatic Test Submission – a time limit can be applied to each Test you deploy. When the time expires, the Test is automatically submitted.
• Task-based navigation – navigate between the same area in each Blackboard site, e.g. move directly from the Module Documents area of one site to the Module Documents area of a different site.

It is worth noting that Blackboard give no assurance that any statements they make regarding product development initiatives, new products and future product upgrades, updates or enhancements will become available until they have been made generally available to their customers.

The team representing Blackboard, including Director of Product Management, Director of Product Marketing, Senior Manager Product Marketing and Senior Product Manager, asked for feedback and comments on a host of new features and enhancements under consideration for Portfolios and Assessments. The general consensus from the audience was that Blackboard should be focussing on bug fixes before introducing new functionality, and this made it difficult for the participants to identify priorities for developing the most important features. The team also generated an audience wish list for new Assignment features. Interestingly the list mirrored greatly the functionality that we have introduced into Blackboard at SHU via the Assignment Handler customisation (including receipt on submission, submission quotas, bulk upload of feedback).

Further information is available about how individuals can get involved in shaping Blackboard technology.