The Campus Pack 4 Release includes a hosted Campus Pack 4 Service that can integrate wikis, blogs, podcasts, journals and other tools with any e-learning environment. With Campus Pack 3, since the Campus Pack software was installed on your Blackboard, all content created using Campus Pack tools resided on your Blackboard server. The Campus Pack 4 Service hosts all content on Learning Objects' servers. The hosted nature of Campus Pack 4 is transparent to the end user and the user experience continues to be tightly integrated as Campus Pack 3 through the Campus Pack 4 Blackboard Building Block Connector. This maintains the integrated user experience making the external hosting transparent to the end user. You can refer to the hosting FAQ for more details on Learning Objects Hosting. The release includes the following.

Release Components

1. Campus Pack 4 Service

The Campus Pack 4 Service provides the social media tools of wikis, blogs, podcast feeds and journals in a single platform.

• The Campus Pack 4 platform can integrate with any e-learning environment.
• Published integration connectors are available for Blackboard Learn, Blackboard Vista/CE, Moodle and eCollege; Desire2Learn, ANGEL and Sakai integrations are currently under development.
• Administrators use a single Administrator Portal to administrate all components and do not need to access separate portals as is the case with the Campus Pack 3 suite components.

This Connector enables Single Sign-on (SSO) from Blackboard to the Campus Pack 4 Service and manages keeping course enrollments in Blackboard synchronized with Campus Pack. There are separate building blocks available for Blackboard 7 & 8 and for Blackboard 9.  

Note: Connectors are also available for Moodle and Blackboard Vista/CE. For more details refer to the administrators resources section in this guide.

3. Building Block Upgrades for Campus Pack 3 Suite Components

Institutions upgrading from Campus Pack 3 to Campus Pack 4 need to install Version 4 of the Building Blocks. These Building Blocks upgrade existing Campus Pack 3 content links to Campus Pack 4.

Teams LX v4 Building Block
Journal LX v4 Building Block
Podcast LX v4 Building Block
Expo LX v4 Building Block

About the Release Guide

The release guide is intended to be a comprehensive guide to familiarize you with the capabilities of Campus Pack 4, to enable you to take advantage of the new features. The release guide includes information on the following topics:

Compatibility Information

Documentation & Resources

Campus Pack Central

Training Resources

Help Documentation

Administrator Resources

Post-upgrade User Experience

New Features & Capabilities

Compatibility Information

Blackboard Compatibility

Campus Pack 4 is compatible with the following versions of Blackboard:

• Blackboard 9.1
• Blackboard 9.0
• Blackboard 8
• Blackboard 7.1

Browser Compatibility

Campus Pack 4 is compatible with the following web browsers:

• Windows OS: Firefox 3.5 and higher, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8.
• Macintosh OS: Safari 3 and Safari 4

Documentation & Resources

Campus Pack Central

Campus Pack Central on Learning Objects User Community site includes several training, help and administrator resources. Although most resources are available to the public, some of the administration resources require you to login with a user account on the communite site.

Training Resources

These resources are shared with the public and you can point your users to these sites or where applicable make this content available on your own support sites.

Quick Start Guides

Video Tutorials

Help Documentation

The User Guide is avaialble on Campus Pack Central. Users can access the help documentation from the help menu. The menu includes two links - one link to the help index and another one to direct the user to a help page relevant to the current screen.

Administrator Resources

Campus Pack 4 Upgrade Guide for Campus Pack 3

Administrator Guide for Campus Pack (requires login to Learning Objects Community)

Administrator Guide for Blackboard Vista/CE Integration (requires login to Learning Objects Community)

Administrator Guide for Moodle Integration (requires login to Learning Objects Community)

Post-upgrade User Experience

 After upgrading to Campus Pack 4 all Campus Pack links will have updated icons.

The first time a user clicks on an upgraded content link they will see a page notifying them that the content is being upgraded and an upgraded site will appear shortly. Navigating away from this page will not interrupt the upgrade.

Here's an example of a site before and after upgrade.

Before Upgrade

Content Link in Blackboard

Content

After Upgrade

Content Link in Blackboard

Content

New Features & Capabilities

Campus Pack 4 includes a number of improvements over Campus Pack 3 and several new features and capabilities.

Standalone Platform

Campus Pack 4 is a platform that tightly integrates with Blackboard Learn to provide the same user experience as Campus Pack 3. This has several implications with regards to significant new capabilities available to Campus Pack users.

Direct Login Capability and External User Accounts

Campus Pack 4 supports direct login and can authenticate users against its own authentication database or against your institutions LDAP database. As a result, with Campus Pack 4, the abilty to create social media content is not limited only to users who can access your Blackboard system.

LMS Neutrality

In addition to Blackboard Learn, Campus Pack 4 can be integrated with any e-learning enviroment using Web Services APIs. Integration connectors are available for Blackboard Vista/CE and Moodle with integration for Desire2Learn, eCollege and ANGEL in developmet.

Centralized Administration

Community Areas

• Give academic departments spaces to collaborate on curriculum and research
• Provide clubs, teams, and other groups a forum to coordinate activities
• Enable administrative departments to easily share information with a broad audience
• Collaborate easily and securely with participants outside of the institution

Content Visibility Across The Platform

Content created in a Course, user's Personal Learning Space or a Community Space can be accessed, linked, copied or moved using the site copy feature in Campus Pack 4.

Site Copy

In this example a student is copying a wiki with facts and figures related to her graduation class to her Personal Learning Space.

Student Information System Integration

Campus Pack 4 also includes a Data Integration Engine to enable you to integrate with your Student Information System or other system of record to automatically create user accounts, courses, and update enrollments in Campus Pack.

Customizable UI

Customize themes, banners, icons, and words throughout the entire platform to meet your institutional branding requirements.

Sharing Content

Campus Pack 4 includes powerful sharing features that give you fine-grained control over access to content created in your Campus Pack. This applies to content created in Courses, Community Areas and in Personal Learning Spaces. Content can be kept private, shared with specific users, community areas (groups), courses, course groups, or shared with everyone at your institution or in the world. In addition, you can invite an external user who does not currently have an account on your system. Domain Permissions in the Administrator Portal allows you to turn off or restrict ot specific roles or in specific areas the features to Invite External User, Share with Everyone at Your Institution or Share with Everyone in the World.

Language Packs for Internationalization

Language Packs in Campus Pack 4 enable you to customize the labels and text that is displayed on the screens, error messages and the date format used in Campus Pack. The application currently ships with language packs for American English, British English and Australian English.

Tagging

Campus Pack 4 includes tagging to enable users to create tags on blog entries, wiki pages and podcast episodes to organize the content and make it easily findable.

Threaded Commenting

Threaded commenting is available for all sites. There can be multiple threads and multiple levels of responses in individual threads.

Hierarchical Site Navigation in Wikis

Campus Pack 4 wikis enable you to create a hierarchical site navigation to organize your wiki pages.

Hierarchical Site Navigation

Managing Site Navigation

Wiki pages can be moved around using drag and drop. Pages can be hidden from the site navigation by dropping them into the Non-navigable section.

Detailed Revision Comparison for Edits

The history screens in Campus Pack have been reworked to show a side-by-side comparison. You can compare any two versions, not just sequential ones, so you can see, for instance, how much has changed between the last edit a user made, and the last ten subsequent edits by Oscar . In addition, there are multiple options to compare content - Text Oly .

Better Search

Search has been improved in Campus Pack and is now integrated inside of the Campus Pack platform and available to your users on Campus Pack screens. The search index is updated real-time, and is no longer a nightly update as with Search LX, as your users update content and new content created is immediately searchable.  

Note: Campus Pack 4 search functionality deprecates the standalone Search LX building block. Search LX cannot search Campus Pack 4 content and it is recommended that you uninstall Search LX on your production system.

Grade Center Integration for Campus Pack Content in Courses

Campus Pack 4 includes the capability provided by Campus Pack 3 to create a Grade Center column at the time of creating a site. In addition, Campus Pack 4 also provides single-click access to the Blackboard Learn Grade Center from the Evaluation screen (known as Assess Blogs & Ass).

Activity Feeds

Campus Pack 4 includes activity feeds in every wiki, blog, journal and podcast feed, in Courses and in Community areas and Personal Learning Spaces.

Latest Activity in a Site

Latest Activity in a Community Space

Activity Details (View all activity link)

Additional Notes On the Release

Hosting for Campus Pack 4.2

Campus Pack 4 is available on Learning Objects' US and UK hosting sites.

Email Notification Capability

Campus Pack 4.2 does not include email notification capability and this will be added with a late Summer update.

Recycle Blog/Wiki Function

The recycle function for sites that have been copied individually or through a Blackboard course copy will be added with a late Summer update.