Fairfield University has purchased a limited number of licenses to a new learning resource, Harmonize, to strengthen our ability to create engaging content within online and hybrid courses.

1 About Harmonize
2 Connecting Harmonize to Your Blackboard Course
3 Choosing a Component
- 3.1 Annotation Tool
- 3.2 Discussion
- 3.3 Poll
- 3.4 Course Q&A
- 3.5 Topic Q&A
- 3.6 Chat
- 3.7 Communication Center
4 Grading and Milestones
- 4.1 Setting Up Milestones
- 4.2 Grading Discussions
- 4.3 Related articles

About Harmonize

Harmonize is a discussion tool integrated with Blackboard that allows students to communicate, interact, and engage more easily with one another. Harmonize takes the Blackboard discussion board to the next level by allowing tagging, easy embedding of multimedia, image and video feedback, and milestones to help faculty and students keep track of their own engagement.

Feature Highlight(s):

AI Rubric Generator: The Harmonize AI Rubric Generator is a feature within the Harmonize learning platform that uses AI to help instructors create rubrics for their discussion assignments. It streamlines the process of rubric creation by generating focus areas and full rubrics based on the instructions provided for a discussion topic. This tool can save instructors time and effort while ensuring clear expectations for students. Rubric Generator Support

Harmonize AI coaching is a feature that provides students with real-time feedback on their work based on instructor-defined rubrics. It helps students improve their writing and understanding of assignments before submitting, fostering self-reflection and revision. Instructors can enable this feature in Harmonize discussions and assignments, and it works by comparing student submissions to the rubric and highlighting areas where they could improve. AI Coaching Support

Connecting Harmonize to Your Blackboard Course

Follow the steps on Adding LTIs from the Content Market in Blackboard Ultra to find and connect to Harmonize.
On the next screen, you will choose a component.

Choosing a Component

Annotation Tool

Harmonize's annotation tools provides teachers and students with the ability to mark up PDFs. This makes for an interactive experience between the instructor and students, allowing students to get feedback quicker and online. Students may also annotate and critique the work of their fellow classmates, promoting social and inclusive learning via media-based student to student interaction. Once the PDF Annotation is created by the instructor, both instructors and students can add new annotations as well as respond to the annotations of others. To do so, navigate to any PDF Annotation and use the markup tools to create annotations.

Select Content Market>Harmonize
Select PDF Annotation and Create New
Enter a title, select Grading preferences, enter point value if graded
Upload or drag and drop PDF by following onscreen prompts
Select Create PDF Annotation
Back in Content Stream, select the PDF
1. Edit the instructions, Annotation Settings, any other media and files
2. Select Save Draft or Publish

Annotation Support

Discussion

Discussions act as assignments in Blackboard and will automatically generate a grade center column. Once you've created a topic name you will be redirected to Blackboard where you can edit to assign a due date, or click on the link to edit the content and milestones, engage with students, and grade their work.

Select Harmonize
Select Discussion and Create New
Enter a title, choose grading, and enter the points assigned
Back in Blackboard, edit the new Harmonize discussion link.
1. Enter a due date and any other settings you desire
2. When complete, select submit
Click on the Harmonize discussion link to open Harmonize
Enter a prompt and choose any

Discussions Support

Poll

You can use Harmonize to survey your students using a quick poll. This is a great feature for checking in on students' understanding of a complex lesson or to gauge their interest or availability for virtual office hours.

To learn more, watch the following video:

https://player.vimeo.com/video/567596792?h=31fb9465eb

Course Q&A

You can create one course Q&A per course through Harmonize. This acts as a space for students to ask general questions about the course.

To learn more, see Q&A Boards (external link).

Topic Q&A

Topic Q&As serve as a space for students to ask general questions about a specific topic. Unlike a discussion, Q&A boards are not connected to the grade center and are not designed for thoughtful, graded discussion.

To learn more, see Q&A Boards (external link).

Chat

Harmonize Chat allows Teachers and Students to communicate in real-time. Both instructors and students can:

Chat with other users in any of their courses that have Harmonize installed.
Create private or group conversations.
Block / Unblock a user.
Mute / Unmute a conversation.
Set their status as online, Away, Busy or Offline.
Mark individual messages as unread.
Mark all conversations as read.
Delete their own messages.
Disable / Enable Chat.
View saved conversations.

To learn more, see Harmonize Chat (external link).

Communication Center

The Communication Center creates a link in Blackboard to an overview page of all Harmonize activity and settings. From the Communication center, you can quickly see missed activity, engagement insights, and tips from Harmonize to take your discussions to the next level.

For more information, see Communication Center (external link).

Grading and Milestones

Setting Up Milestones

Milestones allow you to create multiple participation requirements within a single discussion, encouraging students to engage in the discussion multiple times rather than all at once before the due date.

1. Edit a Harmonize discussion
2. Click on the Milestones Due Dates tab and then click Add Milestones to add a milestone.
3. After adding a single milestone, several options are displayed:
  1. Set Milestone Complete by Dates Relative to: This will default to the assignment due
  2. Turn on Participation Auto-Grading: Off by default. This will automatically assign points based on the students' completion of each milestone.
  3. Milestone: Each milestone can have it's own due date. For example, the first milestone may be two days before the assignment due date to encourage students to engage in the discussion early on. Having enough posts early on can be critical to a successful and engaging discussion. Choose Add Milestone to add more.
  4. Total Requirements: This section provide a summary of your milestone settings.
4. Once all milestones have been entered, click the Save & Close button to save the settings and return to the discussion.

Grading Discussions

Open the Discussion

Unless you have enabled auto-grading, submissions will show up in the grade book if the due date has passed or if all of the milestones are completed, whichever one occurs first.

1. Open your course in Blackboard
2. Open the Discussion:
  1. Under Course Management in the main menu, select Grade Center and then select Needs Grading. Find the discussion under the Item Name column and select one of the students' names.
  2. Go to the course content area where the discussion is linked. Open the discussion by selecting the link.
3. You will be redirected to the Harmonize discussion

Grading in Harmonize

Select Grades and Activities on the top right corner of the instructions
This will open a new tab and show All Students View
1. Click the Showing Activity for drop down menu to select an individual student activity view.
2. On the Individual Student View, you can read the student's original post, any comments they received, and comments they made on other threads.
3. On the top of the page, enter a Grade and Add Instructor Comment
4. Select Submit and Next to view the next student's posts
5. Once complete, close the tab to return to the original discussion and to Blackboard.

The grades will automatically populate int he Blackboard grade center.

Harmonize Faculty Features