Welcome to My Blog!!

Welcome to my Tech Time Blog. I will use this blog to help update the faculty of Southside Virginia Community College concerning our course management tool for our online courses....Blackboard. Here I will post information, updates, and wonderful little tidbits that I pick up that might help you with your online course(s). So stay tuned and subscribe to the RSS feed for this blog so you will automatically know when new posts have been added.

Faculty and Staff Now Have Student Accounts

If you are teaching an online course, it can be beneficial to see the course from a student's perspective. Many of you in the past have enrolled the "svstudent" into your course and used this as a way to access your course and view it as a student. Due to new security issues, this account will soon be deactivated. Because of this change, the VCCS has created student accounts for faculty and most staff based on your current user id and password. You can now use your student user id to enroll yourself in your course as a student, and view the course as your students see it. Here is the formula for your student user id...add " _student" to your current user id (minus the quotation marks of course), and your password will stay the same. The user id just has a minor addition with no changes to the password.

Remember: userid_student; password is the same

Don't forget that you will need to enroll yourself in your course(s) using the user ID noted above (youruserid_student), so here are some instructions on how to do just that.

1. Either go to Blackboard through your MyVCCS page or log-in at http://learn.vccs.edu/
2. Log-in and click on your course (Use your normal user id)
3. Go to the Control Panel within your course>Enroll User in the User Management box>Select to search by User Name>Type in your student user id (username_student) in the Search box>click Search>check Add box next to the user> click Submit>click OK.
4. To view as a student, you will need to log-out, go to http://learn.vccs.edu/ and log-in using your student log-in. To use your student account, you can only go into Blackboard through http://learn.vccs.edu/ since these student accounts only have Blackboard access.

If you have any questions about this, send an email to blackboard@southside.edu.