As you begin to prepare for the start of classes on Friday, you may want to review the information I sent out in April concerning your course areas that were set-up in Blackboard.
http://svtechtime.blogspot.com/2009/04/fall-course-shells-have-been-created-in.html
When working on your course areas, be careful of the following...
*Watch the course copy tutorial.
You can view a tutorial explaining the process of copying content at http://southside.edu/academics/disted/tutorials/coursecopy/. When copying, it might take a few minutes, a few hours or even over a day for your course to copy. Budget your time accordingly. Also do NOT under any circumstances run the copy process more than once for a course. If a course copy takes more than a day, report it to this e-mail address 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. You also do not want to copy your enrollments--beware of this when copying content.
*Contact your publisher concerning course cartridges.
- Publishers are not always clear about whether there cartridges require additional access keys to be purchased by students. Before ordering a cartridge, make sure that your students will not have to buy access keys. If they do, it is up to you to make arrangements with the Bookstore. Managing access keys is NOT supported by the Blackboard Administrator--it is an issue completely between the publisher and the instructor.
- Course cartridges can take several hours to load, and they can load a tremendous amount of content into your class. Be sure to budget time to review the loaded content before your class starts.
- When you order your cartridge, be sure and ask the publisher to copy blackboard@southside.edu when they send the key. Also, be sure and contact blackboard@southside.edu yourself when the publisher sends you the key.
Click here to view, save, and/or print a handout concerning adjusting your course navigation menu in Blackboard.
http://www.scribd.com/full/15707877?access_key=key-avw8aev9x04v7hwpguu
*Clean up your Categories in Blackboard
If you utilize categories, and assign these to assignments within the Grade Center in Blackboard for weighting grades...these need to be cleaned up. They will copy over when you do course copies, so you can end up with multiple "test", "homework", etc. categories within one course. Check your list of categories in Blackboard and remove duplicates. Having duplicates can cause problems as you begin assigning categories and eventually want to weight your grades.
Go to the Grade Center within your Blackboard course --> Manage -- > Categories
*Do not enroll your students!!! The VCCS is currently working on linking Blackboard and SIS. When this happens, I will send you more information on what this means, but it will be important that you have not added any of your students manually to your course. I will begin running enrollments for all Fall cyber and hybrid courses Thursday night. Check your course availability and make sure that your course is ready and available to students by Friday morning. If you have a seated course, I will run your enrollments upon request. Keep in mind that when you request to have the enrollments run for your seated course, that the enrollments will show up in your course the following day.
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