For those of you with online and hybrid courses...
- Do you have a welcome announcement posted giving students information on where to get started in your class?
- Do you have a current syllabus attached in the syllabus area?
- Is your instructor contact information posted in the instructor area?
- Is your assignments area organized into folders or learning modules?
- Do you have information on your first assignment posted and available to students?
- Have you cleaned-up or set-up your grade center? Remember that hiding grade center columns from your view does not make them invisible to students. Use the student preview tool to find out what students are really seeing in your course, especially in the student grades area. Student Preview
- Click through the areas on your course menu. Do you have any duplicate information? This can happen when you course copy from previous semesters. If you find areas with duplicates, starting cleaning and delete out the duplications. For example, in the syllabus area, you may have two disability statements. The one at the top is the most recent, so delete the one at the bottom.
Students will not have access to your course areas until you make them available. Instructors are to make course areas available by 8:00 AM on the day that the class begins. Make sure that your content is ready to go and course is available to students on time, and that courses from previous semesters have been made unavailable. I have posted a link to a guide below on how to make your course available/unavailable. Modifying Course Availability
The following are additional reminders concerning Blackboard and information to keep in mind as you develop your courses and copy content from previous semesters.
- We offer Orientation to Online Learning Sessions for students on campus and through online webinars. We also now have a self-paced, interactive online orientation that students can complete on their own time from anywhere with an internet connection. Here is a link to information on these orientations. Please help to promote these with our students.
http://southside.edu/online-learning-orientation
- Publisher Content
We have the Blackboard building blocks (integration) for four Publishers: McGraw-Hill Connect (which we have had for a few semesters), Pearson MyLabs/Mastering, Cengage Learning MindLinks, and Wiley Plus. If you are using any of these Publisher tools, you can now integrate your content and grades into your Blackboard course areas. Information is linked below for using these integrations. When you go to one of the links, review the information on the resources tab.
- Smarthinking
Smarthinking is an online tutoring service that Southside students have access to use. This is integrated with our Blackboard system. There is a link to Smarthinking, using this integration, on the SVCC tab in Blackboard and in the Student Help area of your course shells. You can direct students to Smarthinking through either of these options, or you can use the Smarthinking tool in Blackboard to make a link to this resource on your course menu or from within any content area (for ex. assignments). Students do not have to create a Smarthinking account. By accessing Smarthinking through the Blackboard integration, an account is set-up based on their Blackboard account and they are automatically signed in.
- Atomic Learning
Atomic Learning provides thousands of short, easy-to-understand tutorial movies and a library of curriculum resources, including tutorials on using Blackboard, Gmail, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, etc. This is another resource that is integrated into our Blackboard System. This will allow you to easily add links to videos on various topics within your course(s). For example, if you have a project in which students must create a PowerPoint slideshow, add links to PowerPoint tutorials for your students to view before completing the project. There are even videos on using graphing calculators for those math instructors. : )
There is information on this resource and how to integrate the videos into your courses in the instructor resources section of all Blackboard course shells, and there is information for students in the student help section. Atomic Learning site is also accessible through the Atomic Learning module on the SVCC tab in Blackboard.
Atomic Learning in Blackboard Video Overview and Tutorials on How to Integrate the Content
- Requirements
Requirements for Online Classes
- Training/User Guides
Blackboard User Guides
- 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.
- Review these handouts on export/import if you plan to use this process to copy content. Exporting Content and Importing Content
- Review this handout on course copy if you plan to go this route.
- Be prepared to wait. When copying content, it might take a few minutes, a few hours, or even over a day for your course to copy. The course copy process should not be run more than once. If a course copy takes more than a 24 hours and you still do not see your content, submit a ticket to Issuetrak to have this checked, but do not start it again. If you do, you could 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 grading option with discussion boards, wikis, journals, or blogs. 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 SmarterMeasure assignment due to the copy. Keep only the one at the top and delete all of the others. 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.)
- The date management tool in Blackboard is a great way to correct dates on content and tools in your course after you run a course copy. Here is a link to information on this tool, and contact me (kelly.goscinski@southside.edu) for assistance if you would like to try using this to update due dates, content item availability, announcement availability dates, etc.... Date Management Tool
- If you include the syllabus content area in your course copy, keep in mind that you will need to remove the existing syllabus file and upload an updated copy for the new term. You will also need to delete any duplicated information on the college disabilities policy. If you have more than one item called "Disabilities Policy", please remove all but the one at the top of this area.
- DO NOT include the "Instructor Resources", "Course Evaluation", or "Student Help" content areas in the course copy or export. These areas are set-up in our course shell template that we use to create all course areas in Blackboard. If you include these in the copy, you are going to end up with duplicate content that will need to be deleted.
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