What is an Offline Assignment?
The Assignment functionality in Blackboard works great when students are submitting their work electronically. But what about assignments that students might complete during class time or that can't so easily be submitted by attaching a file in Blackboard?
Learn Ultra allows you to create an assignment and designate it as being an "offline" assignment. Doing this allows you to still use all of Blackboard's grading features—such as rubrics and feedback—but without there being a digital file to grade.
How to Create an Offline Assignment
- To create an offline assignment, create a regular assignment and then access the settings layer by clicking on the ⚙️ (cog) button. Click the checkbox that's labeled "Collect submissions offline".
- When using an offline assignment, Blackboard still operates with the concept of a student "submission." The difference is that to be able to enter a grade for a student, you need to personally tell Blackboard to create a submission. Do this by opening the assignment's submissions list page and clicking on a student's row. You'll be asked to enter the date and time of the submission.
Offline Assignments vs Manually Creating Gradable Items
In Classic Course View, many faculty handled "offline" submissions by creating a new column in their Grade Center and typing scores in by hand. This is still possible by creating a new "Gradable Item" in Ultra's Gradebook.
In many situations, this approach will work just fine. However, note that using the "Collect submissions offline" approach offers a few key benefits—namely you can use rubrics to evaluate student work and take advantage of the rich text editor for writing feedback. These are not available for manually created Gradable Items.