Northern Illinois University
Teaching with Blackboard
Faculty Development and Instructional Design Center

Blackboard provides two mobile apps to bring interactive teaching and learning to the mobile device, giving students and teachers instant access to their courses, content, and communities anywhere. The suite of apps includes the Blackboard app for students and the Blackboard Instructor app.

The Blackboard app for iOS, Android, and Windows mobile devices provides an intuitive way for students to interact with courses, content, instructors, and other students.

The Blackboard Instructor app provides faculty with a convenient way to access course materials, post announcements, participate in discussions, and grade student Assignment submissions from whenever and wherever. 

Blackboard Instructor

The Blackboard Instructor application can be downloaded from the following locations:

• Google Play store for Android devices
• Apple App Store for iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch

Features and limitations of Blackboard Mobile Learn

With Blackboard Instructor, you can perform these tasks:

• Preview course items, assignments, and tests
• Participate in discussions
• Send announcements
• Interact with your class in Blackboard Collaborate
• Grade student submissions to Assignments

While the app does offer a native environment for accessing Blackboard course content on a mobile device, the underlying technology of whichever mobile device being used may limit the Blackboard features that can be accessed from the app. The following features likely will not work properly when accessed from the app and therefore should only be used when accessing from a full browser on a computer:

• adding new content to a course
• building tests, quizzes, and surveys
• submitting tests, quizzes, and surveys
• submitting assignments
• grading assignments with group submissions or using delegated grading workflows
• adjusting Grade Center options
• viewing any Flash-based instructional content or movies

Accessing Blackboard from a Mobile Browser

The browser view of Blackboard is designed to be compatible with mobile devices and resizes the course to fit your mobile device screen. Many course functions will work well from a mobile browser, but others will not. It is not recommended to add new content, build tests or surveys, grade student work, or work with the Grade Center from the mobile browser.

Blackboard Mobile Learn

Blackboard Mobile Learn is the legacy mobile application, and can no longer be installed on a mobile device. Support ended on August 31, 2017. After that time, mobile devices may not run Blackboard Mobile Learn correctly, depending on the age of the device and the operating system version. It is recommended to transition to the Blackboard Instructor app.

Last Updated: 8/16/2018