Blackboard Academic Suite 8 Integrates Plagiarism Prevention

• By David Nagel
• 02/05/08

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Blackboard has released version 8 of the Blackboard Academic Suite 8. The latest release of the learning management system for academic institutions adds a variety of enhancements driven in large part by feedback from the user community, including improvements for administrators and IT, student self- and peer assessments, improved grading features, and the integration of Blackboard's SafeAssign, a plagiarism detection and prevention service.

SafeAssign debuted back in August as a stand-alone tool for plagiarism detection, but it's now integrated directly with the Academic Suite. SafeAssign checks assignments against databases of published articles and also scans the Internet for materials that might have been plagiarized. The databases the system uses include:

• ProQuest ABI/Inform database, which includes more than 2.6 million articles and is updated weekly;
• Archives of papers submitted to SafeAssign by users; and
• Global Reference Database of papers submitted by students and faculty.

Other new features in the Academic Suite include:

• Enhanced Grade Center with analytics and a new user interface, as well as direct e-mail capabilities and the ability to generate progress reports;
• New "Self and Peer" assessment tool that allows students to review and grade their own work and the work of their peers; and
• Enhancements to the Content System (for creating and sharing content) that include reporting on content usage and a new collaborative workflow.

Blackboard Academic Suite 8 is available now with support for browsers running on Mac OS X and Windows. Prices vary. See Blackboard's site for information on licensing.

More Information:

• Blackboard

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About the author: David Nagel is the executive editor for 1105 Media's online education technology publications, including THE Journal and Campus Technology. He can be reached at [email protected].

Proposals for articles and tips for news stories, as well as questions and comments about this publication, should be submitted to David Nagel, executive editor, at [email protected].