Interactivity – Ultra Essential Guidance

Blackboard offers a variety of ways to add interactivity to your course. For example, you can add:

Blackboard activity types, such as Knowledge checks, Tests, Journals, Forms, Discussions, Conversations.
Activities and interactive resources from other recommended tools, such as H5P, Mentimeter, Padlet, Xerte.

Blackboard activity types

Knowledge check: a multiple choice question in a Document that can help students prepare for, or check their understanding of the content.
Test: a set of questions of various types, such as multiple choice or calculation questions. You can also create Question banks, to easily reuse questions. Tests can help students remember and practice content and help you identify misunderstandings or questions students may have or understand whether they have achieved some of the learning objectives. Tests can also be used for summative assessment.
Journal: a private space for students to reflect on the course, a project or their learning, either periodically or when an activity ends.
Form: a survey which can contain multiple choice, open ended and other types of questions. It can help you learn students’ questions about a topic, get feedback on sections of the course or see how students’ confidence develops.
Discussion: a space where students can discuss with each other a topic you suggest.
Conversation: a space where students can discuss or ask questions about a specific resource or activity.

You can add activities and interactive resources from other recommended tools too. Examples include:

H5P enables you to easily create a variety of interactive resources, such as short quizzes for students to practice what they learned or branching scenarios to help them develop their critical and decision-making skills.
Padlet offers a colourful online board for posting comments, images, links, polls and recordings. It can be used for brainstorming, organising and sharing resources, as well as providing a first point of social contact for students or space for them to ask questions about a topic. It also allows instructors to create breakout links for groupwork so that each group can only access one portion of the Padlet.
Mentimeter is polling software that can be used to create live or asynchronous polls, quizzes, word clouds and activities. These can be embedded in Blackboard.

The recommended ways to add interactivity depend on the type, tool and location within the course.

You can add resources to Learning modules and Folders by opening them, going to the location you would like to add an activity and:

For Blackboard tools, such as Journals, Tests, and Forms, click + > Create then select the name of the tool.
For external tools integrated with Blackboard, such as H5P and Padlet, click + > Course Tools. You don’t have to know which tools are included in this category, you can browse them in the Course Tools list that appears when you select.
For other external publicly available resources, click + > Create > Web Link, add the URL and a meaningful Display Name and Description.

You can add resources to a Document by opening it, going to the location you would like to add an activity and:

Add knowledge checks guidance.
To link to publicly available resources, copy the link, write descriptive text within a Content block in your Document, select it, click the Link icon, paste the link you copied and Save. Please ensure the websites the link goes to is secure.
Embed publicly available resources guidance.
You may be able to include resources from external tools integrated with Blackboard via + > Course Tools within the text editor, but please note that this doesn’t work well for all tools, so you may need to add them in a different way described above.

Learn more about interactive learning materials and tools that can help you add specific ABC learning types to your Blackboard course.