Hi Everyone,

A few Blackboard reminders as we begin a new semester.
If you are still in the process of course copying from an early semester into your new course area, please keep in mind that this is happening throughout the VCCS system. There has been a backlog of course copies, which means they are taking longer to process. It can take up to 24 hours for a course copy to complete. DO NOT run course copy a second time. Submit a ticket on Issuetrak concerning the problem, and I can in turn ask the VCCS to check there logs and see if the copy is pending before you run it again. If you run it a second time and there was just a delay, you will end up with duplicate content. (Here is a link to a tutorial in course copying if needed. http://southside.edu/academics/disted/tutorials/coursecopy/)

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. Here is a web address with instructions on modifying your course menu (http://www.scribd.com/full/15707877?access_key=key-avw8aev9x04v7hwpguu) . If you have both a "Student Help" and "Help?" buttons, please keep the "Student Help" and remove the other. The "Help?" was brought over when you did your course copy and is not needed. This also applies with "Student's Grade" and "My Grades". You don't need both buttons, so you can remove the "My Grades" option.

I am starting the student enrollment process. If all goes well, students will be enrolled in your course areas in Blackboard tomorrow (Thursday). Please make sure that you make your course area available to students by Friday morning if it is a regular session online or hybrid course. Go to this web address for instructions on how to make your course available. http://svtechtime.blogspot.com/2009/05/changing-course-availability-in.html If your content isn't quite up and ready to go, at the start of your session, 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 their course on time.

Remember that you are NOT to manually enroll your students or remove students from your course. Blackboard and SIS are linked now, so your enrollments in Blackboard will be updated every morning. Here is a web address with more information that was sent out in November concerning this Blackboard/SIS Integration tool. http://svtechtime.blogspot.com/2009/11/student-informationblackboard.html

Blackboard course shells have been created for all online and seated courses. Although student enrollments are being run for all courses, including seated, these course areas will be unavailable to students until the instructor changes the course availability.

Good luck this semester, and if you need any assistance with Blackboard, please let me know.