The Fall Semester Begins!!

I am in the process of preparing the student enrollments for our first day of classes. I will enroll students in all of the online and hybrid courses tonight. Student enrollments for seated courses are done by request only. If you are a seated instructor, when your course is ready for student access, let me know and I will set it up so your course will be included in the daily student enrollment the following business day. Some of you have already given the okay to begin running your seated course enrollments, so I will begin those tonight as well.

• Is your course available or unavailable? Double check the status of your course within Blackboard and make any necessary modifications. Click here for instructions on changing course availability.

• If your content isn't quite up and ready to go, at the start of your session, keep or make your course available, but post a welcome announcement with information for your students. Let them know when you will have the content ready. Students become very concerned if they can not access the course on time.

• Check your course menu, do you have duplicate buttons or areas that are empty? When you copied over course content into your new course, you probably copied buttons that you don't need. You need to get rid of those to clean up your course menu. Click here to view, download, and/or print a handout on modifying your course menu.
• Are your students enrolled in your Blackboard course area? Go to the "Control Panel" in your course and click on "List/Modify Users", then "List All", and "List All" again. From this screen you can see all of the students enrolled and compare to your enrollment list in SIS. If you don't see any students enrolled but they are on your enrollment list...let me know. You can submit a ticket through IssueTrak, and let me know that you are not seeing any students enrolled and include your 5 digit course id number in the request.

• Check your email address that is set-up in Blackboard. Go to the "Control Panel" in your course and click on "List/Modify Users", then "List All", and "List All" again. Find your own information in the list and verify that the email that is set-up within Blackboard is the email account that you are utilizing. If students send you emails using the "email" tool in Blackboard, it will go to that account.

Fall Course Information and Enrollments

Welcome Back Everyone...of course some of us lucky ones never left. : )

As you begin to prepare for the start of classes on Friday, you may want to review the information I sent out in April concerning your course areas that were set-up in Blackboard.

http://svtechtime.blogspot.com/2009/04/fall-course-shells-have-been-created-in.html

When working on your course areas, be careful of the following...

*Watch the course copy tutorial.
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.

*Contact your publisher concerning course cartridges.

• 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.

*Clean up your Course Menu!!!!
Click here to view, save, and/or print a handout concerning adjusting your course navigation menu in Blackboard.
http://www.scribd.com/full/15707877?access_key=key-avw8aev9x04v7hwpguu

*Clean up your Categories in Blackboard
If you utilize categories, and assign these to assignments within the Grade Center in Blackboard for weighting grades...these need to be cleaned up. They will copy over when you do course copies, so you can end up with multiple "test", "homework", etc. categories within one course. Check your list of categories in Blackboard and remove duplicates. Having duplicates can cause problems as you begin assigning categories and eventually want to weight your grades.

Go to the Grade Center within your Blackboard course --> Manage -- > Categories

*Do not enroll your students!!! The VCCS is currently working on linking Blackboard and SIS. When this happens, I will send you more information on what this means, but it will be important that you have not added any of your students manually to your course. I will begin running enrollments for all Fall cyber and hybrid courses Thursday night. Check your course availability and make sure that your course is ready and available to students by Friday morning. If you have a seated course, I will run your enrollments upon request. Keep in mind that when you request to have the enrollments run for your seated course, that the enrollments will show up in your course the following day.