The New Box on the Docs

Online and face to face faculty are likely familiar with the Crocodoc inline grading tool, licensed for use by Blackboard. For a number of years, this third-party cloud-based document conversion system was the tool used to record faculty’s annotations of student’s digital work to provide them with detailed and relevant feedback as if they were handing back a marked-up paper.

Awhile back, Crocodoc was acquired by Box – a big player in the cloud storage field. Now, Crocodoc as a product is being phased out and “New Box” is taking the stage and with it – a number of significant improvements. New Box’s support for over 100 file types as opposed to 7, printing, and even video are quite welcome additions for sure.

The outgoing Crocodoc interface can be seen on the left. The updated but familiar New Box interface is on the right. Getting the big questions out of the way:

• Work previously graded in the old interface will remain in Blackboard and can be viewed in the new interface. Other in progress type scenarios have different results, however nothing is lost and the feedback cycle can continue uninterrupted.
• Rubrics, while closely related to this workflow, are not part of the Crocodoc platform and remain unchanged.

Due to the nature of the transition, as a successor to Crocodoc, the New Box interface will feel very familiar. Who knows, Blackboard even suggests you may not notice!

For a brief refresher on how to use this tool, we advise you to take a look at the “Assignment inline grading workflow with New Box View” in Blackboard’s tutorial library or check out the video below.