Want to view your Blackboard course as a student?

If you are teaching an online course, it can be beneficial to see the course from a student's perspective. All VCCS faculty and most staff have a student account based on his or her current user id and password. These accounts have been in place for a few semesters now. Unless you are new to Southside, this isn't anything new, but the instructions on how to enroll your student account in your course are a little different now that we are in Blackboard 9.

You can and should use your student user id to enroll yourself in your course as a student, and view the course as your students see it. I especially encourage you to view the student grades area, you might be surprised at what you see and how it is displayed.

Here is the formula for your student user id...add " _student" to your current user id (minus the quotation marks of course), and your password will stay the same. The user id just has the minor addition with no changes to the password.

You can find the directions below or click here for a handout with screen captures.

To enroll yourself in your course...

Step 1
From within the Blackboard course area, click on "Users and Groups" on the Control Panel and "Users" from that drop-down menu.

Step 2
Click the "Enroll User" button on the top left of the Users window.

Step 3
Type in your student user name in the user name box. username_student

Step 4
Change the role to "student" if necessary and enrollment availability should be yes.

Step 5
Click "Submit"


To log-in and access your course as a student... (Remember a course must be available to access it using a student account.)

Step 1
Go to http://learn.vccs.edu/ This is a direct url for Blackboard. Your student account does not have an SIS or Gmail account, so you can not go through your MySVCC page. If you were already in blackboard, make sure that you actually click "log-out" before trying to login as a student.

Step 2
Log-in using you student user id and your regular password for accessing Blackboard.

Step 3
Once you have logged in, you should see a link to your course on the SVCC tab, as long as that course is available to students. Click the link to access the course. You should not see the control panel as a student, so if you do you are not logged in as a student. Click log-out at the top of your Blackboard window and try logging in again.