Spring 2011 Course Removal From Blackboard

It is time for some housekeeping in Blackboard. As you may have already noticed, Spring 2011 (SP11) course areas in Blackboard have been identified and marked for removal on April 30th.  Although the VCCS does maintain an archive of your courses, it is recommended that you maintain a copy of your course by exporting the course content. All archived courses will be available through the VCCS for about 2 years after they are removed from Blackboard. You should also download a copy of your grade center from Blackboard for each course as back-up as well, if you have not done so already. (Downloading and Uploading from the Grade Center--Video Tutorial)

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. From your SVCC tab or Teach tab, you will need to click on the circular icon (looks similar to a gear) 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 display in your "My Blackboard Courses" module.  The criteria for removal at this stage is:

1. Course ID's ending in "SP11"
2. Or created before January 1, 2011

You should export content from any courses planned for removal AND save the zipped files on your computer for future use. (These file are not stored in Blackboard.)

Click on the link below and scroll down to the section called "Course Management and Navigation". From there you will find instructions on exporting course content. You can either view the instructions or download to save or print.

Blackboard Instructional Handouts

Summer Course Shells

Your course areas in Blackboard for all online, hybrid, and seated summer classes were available to instructors as of April 7th. Remember that the update to Blackboard is scheduled for the weekend of May 12th. The VCCS technicians will begin the upgrade Friday night (May 11th) and should complete the upgrade on the 12th. I do not have an exact start time at this point, but for now plan to lose access to Blackboard on Friday evening, and to be safe, do not plan to regain access until Sunday. You can proceed with running course copies and/or export/imports to move content from previous semester course shells into your summer course areas. You do not need to wait until after the upgrade.

Remember that there are still a few training sessions left addressing Blackboard 9.1. The training dates, times, locations, etc. can be found here. The time for the training on April 17th in Keysville on the new Grade Center features has been changed from 10:30 AM to 3:00 PM. If you had planned to attend, please make note of this change.

The following are reminders concerning Blackboard and information to keep in mind as you develop your courses.

Course Availability
Instructors are to make course areas available by 8:00 AM on the day that the session begins.

Student Enrollments and Instructor Student Accounts
Student enrollments within Blackboard will be activated on May 15th, so students should be enrolled in course areas on the 16th. They will not have access to your course areas until you make the areas available within Blackboard. DO NOT enroll students in your Blackboard courses. This is a completely automated process. If you manually enroll students, this causes problems.

NEW!!! When Blackboard is updated in May, instructors will no longer have the capability to enroll or remove students from courses, but instructor student accounts will automatically be enrolled in all course shells (as students). This is not a Blackboard 9.1 feature, but something that the VCCS has been working towards and will be implemented at the same time as the upgrade.

Export and Import Course Content or Course Copy

You can copy your content from one course to another by using either "Course Copy" or "Export/Import". Neither option seems to be a perfect solution, so remember to always gives yourself time to review the copied content. Export/Import does give you a back-up copy of your content saved to either your computer or other storage device, and Blackboard reps have stated that this is a more reliable process, especially if you have a lot of content. At Southside, however, we have seen some problems when using export/import related to copying tests in Blackboard, so please be aware of that.

Whatever method you choose, do this sooner rather than later. Don't leave copying content until the week before classes begin, or even worse, the day that classes begin. Give yourself plenty of time to review and update your content. I know that sometimes classes are added at the last minute, and nothing can be done about those situations, but for classes that are on the schedule now...go ahead and complete this step early.

If you course copy or use Export/Import to copy content from a previous course(s) into a new course shell in Blackboard or if you use a publisher cartridge, you may unintentionally bring over additional buttons that you don't need. You shouldn't have duplicate buttons on your course menu. Please either remove those or make them unavailable to students. (See the Blackboard Training Materials below.) Here are some tips to keep in mind before you begin this copy process.

• Review this handout on export/import if you plan to use this process to copy content.
  
  
• Review this handout on course copy if you plan to go this route.
  
  
• Be prepared to wait. When copying, it might take a few minutes, a few hours or even over a day for your course to copy. Do NOT under any circumstances run the copy process more than once for a course. If a course copy takes more than a day, submit a ticket to Issuetrak to have this checked, 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.
  
  
• Select "Grade Center Columns and Settings" during course copy and export/import if you utilize tests in Blackboard, the Assignment feature that allows students to upload work into BB, or the "grade forum" option with discussion boards. If you want your grade center columns to copy over or if you have anything linked to the Grade Center, this must be selected during course copy or export/import. This DOES NOT bring over your students' names or grades from a previous semester.
  
  
• No matter what process you decide to use, if you copy content, review it carefully after the process is completed. Correct dates, modify content, and reorganize as needed. Within the assignments area, you will have more that one READI assignment due to the copy. Get rid of the items identified as READI assessments, and keep only the one called SmarterMeasure. This is the updated item that was in our template. Also, if you have two "Student Grades" buttons on your course menu, get rid of one. (See the template information below.)