Blackboard semester wrap-up

The Spring 2013 semester is almost over! What happens to your Blackboard courses? What should you do to properly wrap up your courses? Read below for more information on the iTeam’s recommendations for archiving current courses and requesting future courses.

- In or around mid-June, students will no longer see your Spring 2013 Blackboard courses as long as Availability is set to Term Availability. To double-check this setting, go to Control Panel > Customization > Properties > Availability.

- After the semester ends, your students’ names and their grades will still appear in your course, but we encourage you to back up this data. If you used the Grade Center, download it by following the instructions here: http://bit.ly/UIMAXd

- In addition, you may want to Archive your course. Course Archives (.zip files) contain all content, grades, and student and faculty interactions. Directions for archiving and your course are here: http://bit.ly/VA5Ubg

Activate your Summer or Fall courses

Please visit http://ole.sandiego.edu and click on Faculty: New Course Request on the right-hand side of that page. Your course will be put in the activation queue and you will be notified within 3 business days. Once the new course shell is created, you can then copy the content from earlier courses by following the directions here: http://bit.ly/Vqq1Tm

Blackboard End-of-Semester Checklist

Check out this quick video from the University of Incarnate Word, which describes what you should do at the end of each semester with your course. It explains the differences between archiving and exporting, and shows you how to back up your Grade Center. A must-watch for any professor at the end of fall, spring or summer!

Groups in Blackboard

Everything you ever wanted to know about Groups in Blackboard is here on this page!

This first video from Grand Rapids CC will walk you through adding the Groups tool to your Blackboard course, creating Groups and Group Sets, selecting student users for each group, and previewing Groups from the student view.

Here are three more links from Blackboard’s On Demand tutorials site that break Groups down even further:

• Creating Groups and Adding Students
• Creating Group Sets
• Creating a Single Group

Blackboard: Exporting and importing a single test

The iTeam frequently receives the question, “How do I move a test from one course to another?” The answer is simpler than you think! There is no need to copy the entire course from one shell to another. You can export and download a test from one course, and later import it into another. This short tutorial, created by Blackboard On-Demand, demonstrates that process.

Blackboard Grade Center Overview

Here’s a four-minute overview of the Blackboard Grade Center by Liz Stover of CFCC. It covers Categories, the Icon Legend, grading schemas, and managing and reordering columns. This is a great first introduction to the capabilities of the Blackboard Grade Center.

What is a Merged Course, and how do I know if I want one?

When activating Blackboard (Bb) courses at USD, faculty are presented with the option to ‘Merge’ their courses. Called ‘Cross-listing’ in the past, course merging creates a single grade center and course shell when several sections are combined into one. This enables the instructor to manage multiple sections within one Bb course, reducing the need to upload redundant content to multiple courses. Examples of courses that might be merged would be:

• Multiple sections of the same course – for instance if an instructor is teaching ACCT-101, sections 01 and 02
• A lecture course and a lab in which student enrollment is the same. It is also possible to merge two courses that have different instructors or where two instructors are co-teaching.

Course merging results in the appearance of a ‘Parent’ course and ‘Child’ courses in you’re My Courses module when you log in to Bb. The Child courses should have the annotation similar to, “unavailable – Child course of ACCT-101-XX-201209-12-13 – Principles of Financial Acctg.” The Parent course, or merged course, is the only one available to the students and is the one an instructor will use to teach his/her course. Child courses can be hidden to reduce confusion and keep the My Courses list concise.

What’s coming in Blackboard

Here’s a sneak peak at some new, upcoming features in Blackboard!

Adding a Collaborate session to your Blackboard course

The University of Houston – Downtown’s Technology Learning Services department has created a concise and helpful PDF with screenshots explaining how to create a Collaborate session and add it to your Blackboard course. View it here: Create a Collaborate Session

Tutorial: Messages Tool in Blackboard

This tutorial will show you how to enable the Messages tool (a Bb internal email system) and the My Messages Module.

How to Add Test Students in Blackboard

This video tutorial will walk you through how to create a test student in blackboard. Test students are used by professors in order to view their course from a student’s perspective.