H1N1 and Blackboard

I know that we have been hearing a lot concerning H1N1 as of late, and many colleges are looking at plans on how to manage an outbreak. The VCCS is no different, and each college is looking at what will happen if their college must close down temporarily. Most schools, including Southside, have decided that all seated courses will go online utilizing Blackboard in the event of a closure.

Blackboard can be used to post lecture notes, instructional materials, assignments, announcements, and tests. You can also use the email tool as an easy, quick way to send mass emails to your students.

It is time to be prepared and ready with your seated courses. Waiting until the college is effected by H1N1 to then look into Blackboard is not the way to go. If you are not already using Blackboard with your courses, check to see that you have a course area set-up for each of your seated courses in Blackboard, make sure your students are enrolled, and begin using some tools in Blackboard to familiarize yourself with this resource. For example, begin by posting your syllabus, post your instructor contact information, and begin using the Announcement tool .

Go to the web address below for information on accessing Blackboard. There are also training handouts on listing the users in your course (to check your student enrollments), how to modify the course navigation menu, organizing/adding course content, and adding an assignment upload area into your course for students to submit assignments within Blackboard. There are also Blackboard 8 tutorials within Atomic Learning that could help you navigate Blackboard as well.

There are multiple steps involved with using testing within Blackboard, so if you wish to try out the testing feature, you may want to request some assistance.

Send an email to blackboard@southside.edu if you have questions or need assistance. Ashley Leslie (ashley.leslie@southside.edu), our Instructional Technologist, is also an excellent resource in designing and organizing your course on Blackboard.

If you find that you need a course area created or you just need your students enrolled in your Blackboard area, please submit a ticket through our help request system. Please note what you need and for what course (example: ENG 111 02) in the ticket. These requests should only be for Fall 2009 courses. https://southside.issuetrak.com/login.asp

Blackboard Instructor Information:
https://sites.google.com/a/email.vccs.edu/southside-information-technology-site/blackboard-1
Atomic Learning Information:
https://sites.google.com/a/email.vccs.edu/southside-information-technology-site/atomiclearning

Students Dropped From Courses

We have hit that point again in the semester where students have been dropped for non-payment. Although I am testing out a new tool that integrates Student Information and Blackboard, this has only been used with a few courses this fall (those instructors have been notified). This means that when students are dropped for non-payment, this does not translate into removal or disabling of access to their course areas in Blackboard.

The process is the same as it has been in previous semesters. Instructors must compare their class roster from SIS with their listing of students within their Blackboard course areas. DO NOT REMOVE STUDENTS FROM YOUR COURSE IN BLACKBOARD!! Many students who are dropped for non-payment will bring their account up-to-date and will reenroll in their courses. If you remove the student, all submitted work, discussion board postings, and grades in the Grade Center are gone. We can not get them back!! As I said, this is no different from previous semesters, so I am sorry that this is repetitive for many of you. This process will be changing for the spring semester and should be much easier on your end. I will send more information out about that at a later date.

For now, the correct process is to make the course area unavailable to these students. If they are reenrolled later, you can then make the course available to them again without losing any of their previous work. The link below has information about this process and steps to change the availability status of individual students.

http://svtechtime.blogspot.com/2009/06/removing-students-from-your-course-in.html

The Fall Semester Begins!!

I am in the process of preparing the student enrollments for our first day of classes. I will enroll students in all of the online and hybrid courses tonight. Student enrollments for seated courses are done by request only. If you are a seated instructor, when your course is ready for student access, let me know and I will set it up so your course will be included in the daily student enrollment the following business day. Some of you have already given the okay to begin running your seated course enrollments, so I will begin those tonight as well.

• Is your course available or unavailable? Double check the status of your course within Blackboard and make any necessary modifications. Click here for instructions on changing course availability.

• If your content isn't quite up and ready to go, at the start of your session, keep or make 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.

• 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.
• 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. You can submit a ticket through IssueTrak, and let me know that you are not seeing any students enrolled and include your 5 digit course id number in the request.

• Check your email address that is set-up in Blackboard. Go to the "Control Panel" in your course and click on "List/Modify Users", then "List All", and "List All" again. Find your own information in the list and verify that the email that is set-up within Blackboard is the email account that you are utilizing. If students send you emails using the "email" tool in Blackboard, it will go to that account.

Fall Course Information and Enrollments

Welcome Back Everyone...of course some of us lucky ones never left. : )

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.

*Clean up your Course Menu!!!!
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.

Summer 08 Courses To Be Removed From Blackboard

The VCCS has marked all Blackboard Summer 08 courses (SU08) for archival, and they will be removed from the Blackboard "production" area on August 5th. Blackboard is, of course, not designed as a permanent storage area for course materials. Keeping old courses can negatively impact the overall performance of the system and needs to be cleaned-up periodically. All archived courses will be available through the VCCS for about 1 year after they are removed from Blackboard.

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. You will need to click on the "pencil" icon 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 displayed in your "My Blackboard Courses" module.You may want to export content from your SU08 courses and save the zipped files on your computer for future use.

Directions to Export Course Content
1. Go to the "Control Panel" within your course.
2. Click on "Export Course" within the "Course Options" box.
3. Click "Export" again.
4. Select all materials you wish to export...including "Grade Center Columns and Settings".
5. Click "Submit".
6. When you receive an email confirmation that this has been processed, go back to "Export Course", you should see the zipped file with your content. Click on the zipped file and save to your computer or flash drive.

End of Summer Sessions and Blackboard

It is almost the end of the summer session. There are a couple of things that will need to be done soon or after the end of your session.

1. If you taught a cyber course during any of the summer sessions and have not posted an announcement concerning completing the online course evaluation, please do so ASAP!! There is a button located on the course menu that will direct students to the evaluation. Please place a permanent announcement in your course asking students to click on that button to complete the online survey of the course.
   
2. Once the summer session is completed, please make the course area in Blackboard unavailable to students. Click here to view instructions on how to alter course availability.

Summer Session Course Evaluations

Cyber course evaluations are now available within your online course(s). First summer session (5-week) courses are nearing an end, so it is time for students in these online courses to complete their evaluation.

If you are an instructor of an online course for the first five week session, please post an announcement in your course instructing students to complete the end of course evaluation by clicking on the "Course Evaluation" button on the course menu.

Students were instructed on the "Course Evaluation" page to click on "Mark Reviewed" after completing the evaluation. If they do this : ) , then you will be able to see who has complete it by following the steps noted below.

1. Go to your course within Blackboard
2. Click on "Course Evaluation" on your course menu on the left
3. Click "Edit View" in the upper right corner
4. Click the "Manage" button found on the right
5. Click on "Adaptive Release and Review Status: User Progress"

From that screen you will be able to see who has clicked on "Mark Reviewed".

Granted, this is assuming that students will read the directions and will be honest, but it may at least give you some idea of student completion of the course evaluation surveys. We appreciate your assistance in encouraging students to complete these evaluations.