Thursday, May 21, 2009

The Summer Session Begins

May 22nd begins our Summer Schedule of courses at Southside. I began running the enrollments for the summer session tonight, May 21st, at 10:00 pm. for all online and hybrid courses. Enrollments for seated courses with an area established in Blackboard were run for those who submitted a request to blackboard@southside.edu.

Since we are ready to roll, there are a few things that should be checked as we start this new session.
  1. Is your course available or unavailable? If your course is part of the first five-week session or the ten-week session, your course should be available by the morning of May 22nd. Double check the status of your course within Blackboard and make any necessary modifications. There is a posting in my blog on changing availability. Please see that for step-by-step instructions.

  2. If your content isn't quite up and ready to go, keep 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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. Send me an email at blackboard@southside.edu. Let me know that you are not seeing any students enrolled and include your 5 digit course id number in the email.