Update Concerning Removal of Spring 08 Courses from Blackboard

All Spring 2008 (and prior) courses will be removed from Blackboard.

The criteria for removal at this stage is:
1. Course ID ending in "SP08"
2. Or course areas created before Jan 1, 2008

Courses marked for deletion, had the statement "Will delete May 30, 2009" added to their title within Blackboard on April 15th. Check your courses!!!

On April 30, 2008, all of these flagged courses will be removed from the Blackboard production area.

Fall course shells have been created in Blackboard!!

Course shells have been created for all cyber, hybrid, and seated Fall courses. If your course was in SIS by Friday, April 17th, your Blackboard area was created for you. Any BB sections needed for courses added to the Fall schedule after April 17th will be created upon request. Email the request including the 5 digit course id number to blackboard@southside.edu, and you will have a Blackboard section.

The same template used for the summer courses was used for the fall. The course menu includes buttons for the following: Announcements, Syllabus, Instructor, Assignments, Discussion Board, External Links, My Grades, Email, and Help. All cyber courses also include a button for the course evaluation. You can add more areas to the course menu if needed. Be careful not to remove the "Help", "Course Evaluation", or "Assignments" buttons from the course menu. They already contain content for the students, so removing them from the menu would delete out this content. A banner image has also been included at the top of the "Announcements" page. If you have another image that you would rather use, feel free to replace it.

Student Enrollment
Students are not enrolled in your course shell yet. Remember as students begin to enroll in courses, do not add the students to the courses yourself. I will run the enrollments for the summer semester the day before classes start. It is best to wait because so many students are adding, then dropping, and then adding courses before the start of the semester.

Copying Content and Using a Publisher Cartridge
Before you begin creating your course, review the information below on copying content and using Publisher cartridges.

You can view a tutorial explaining the process of copying content at http://southside.edu/academics/disted/tutorials/coursecopy/. When copying, it might take a few minutes, a few hours or even over a day for your course to copy. Budget your time accordingly. Also do NOT under any circumstances run the copy process more than once for a course. If a course copy takes more than a day, report it to this e-mail address but do not start it again. If you do, you will end up with multiple copies of your course content and deleting the duplicate content will take you quite a bit of time. You also do not want to copy your enrollments--beware of this when copying content.

Course Cartridges
Some of you use course cartridges. Course cartridges are publisher supplied content. If you plan on going this route, please pay careful attention to the following:

• Publishers are not always clear about whether there cartridges require additional access keys to be purchased by students. Before ordering a cartridge, make sure that your students will not have to buy access keys. If they do, it is up to you to make arrangements with the Bookstore. Managing access keys is NOT supported by the Blackboard Administrator--it is an issue completely between the publisher and the instructor.
  
• Course cartridges can take several hours to load, and they can load a tremendous amount of content into your class. Be sure to budget time to review the loaded content before your class starts.
  
• When you order your cartridge, be sure and ask the publisher to copy blackboard@southside.edu when they send the key. Also, be sure and contact blackboard@southside.edu yourself when the publisher sends you the key.

Please send all requests for technical assistance to that address as well. Contact Ashley Leslie for help in designing and developing your course content. All issues with usernames and passwords should be directed to sishelp@southside.edu.

Blackboard Spring 08 Courses Will Soon Be Archived

On April 15th, the VCCS will flag/mark all Blackboard Spring 08 courses (SP08) for archival, and they will soon be removed from the Blackboard "production" area. I do not have a definite date as of yet for when they will be removed. Blackboard is, of course, not designed as a permanent storage area for course materials. Keeping old courses can negatively impact the overall performance of the system and needs to be cleaned-up periodically. All archived courses will be available through the VCCS for about 1 year after they are removed from Blackboard.

If you have taught online, login to your "MySVCC" page and click on "Blackboard" to see which courses you are enrolled in as an instructor. You will need to click on the "pencil" icon found on the upper right corner of your "My Blackboard Courses" module. This will allow you to see all courses that you have taught that are currently in Blackboard, even if you have chosen to not have them displayed in your "My Blackboard Courses" module.


You may want to export content from your SP08 courses and save the zipped files on your computer to use with future courses.

Direction to Export Course Content

1. Go to the "Control Panel" within your course.
2. Click on "Export Course" within the "Course Options" box.
3. Click "Export" again.
4. Select all materials you wish to export...including "Grade Center Columns and Settings".
5. Click "Submit".
6. When you receive an email confirmation that this has been processed, go back to "Export Course", you should see the zipped file with your content. Click on the zipped file and save to your computer or flash drive.