Summer Course Shells and Blackboard 9

Summer? What happened to the Spring semester?

It is time to start organizing and arranging your Blackboard course areas for the upcoming Summer session. Course shells are up and instructors enrolled. Remember that students will not be enrolled until the day before the Summer session begins, and they will be enrolled for all 5-week and 10-week courses. You should not be enrolling any students manually.

When your course areas were set-up, they were set as "unavailable" to students. You will have to make it available when your session is ready to begin. (I will send you updated instructions before the start of the summer session.) As you know, Blackboard will be upgraded from version 8 to 9 on May 15th, so if you are teaching a summer course using Blackboard...be prepared to do so with Blackboard 9.

Even with this upgrade, you can follow your normal course set-up procedure and go ahead and begin putting your course together, but keep in mind that you will need to check it with a fine-tooth-comb after the upgrade. Blackboard will be down for at least 24 hours beginning at 12:00 AM on May 15th to complete this update. After all is completed and you are able to access your course areas, you will need to double check all content and areas of your summer course(s). Be prepared for some clean-up, although hopefully any problems will be minor. : ) You should export (not archive) a copy of your course(s) before the 15th as a back-up, and I will send a reminder out with instructions as we get closer to the date.

Remember that we are offering a series of Blackboard 9 training sessions throughout April. Go to our Technology Training Site for more information and to register to attend a session. A Blackboard 9 Basics workshop has been added on the Christanna Campus for April 14th from 2:00-3:30 due to a conflict with the original session time. If you would like to attend, please click the link above to sign up.