Course Availability

It is recommended to have your Blackboard site ready one week before the semester start date to allow students access to the course syllabus and important course announcements. It is suggested to have your course syllabus, contact information, and an announcement regarding the course schedule posted by this date. If you are still working on your Blackboard course and wish to hide areas of the course from students, use these steps to reorder and manage course menu items.

If you would like to make your course available to students earlier than one week prior to the semester start date, visit the Make a Course Available to Students Blackboard Help page.

Copy and Move Course Content

Copying course materials into an existing course will add content to a course, but it won't remove existing content. You can only copy materials into a course if you have the role of instructor, teaching assistant (TA), or course builder in that course. To view instructions for copying course content, please visit the Copying Course Content YouTube video.

Blackboard Manager - Course Merge

Some instructors prefer to combine multiple course sites into a single merged Blackboard course. This allows them to post materials only once for all enrolled students to see, rather than posting to each separate course site. At NDSU we have a tool faculty use to merge their courses called Blackboard Manager.

In a merged course, students will see the name of the original course and its content, as well as the content from the parent course. Blackboard Manager does not copy any content. After merging, the child course(s) will be unavailable, and new content can be added to the parent course only.

To learn more please visit our Blackboard Manager KB page.

Find your Courses

Links to access your past, current, and future courses are located in the Courses menu, with the ability to filter/sort for a cleaner look and feel. There is a similar option to access organization sites.

For more information, view Blackboard's Find Your Courses help article.

Clean up My Blackboard Courses

As courses get copied from semester to semester, they can sometimes get cluttered with unwanted materials, duplicate items, and more. Decluttering your Blackboard site will reduce course size, improve accessibility scores, avoid potential Grade Center issues, prepare for future copying, and more.

Some ways to declutter your Blackboard Courses are:

• Delete hidden or unused Grade Center columns
• Check your course content for duplicated files and folders.
• Review your course for content that is no longer used.

Adding Course Materials – Inclusive Access

To learn more on how to add Inclusive Access course materials to your Blackboard course, please visit the Add Course Materials link to your Blackboard Ultra Course KB page.

Make a Course Available to Students

A course must be opened before students enrolled in the course can view or access the course and its content. Students can't access closed courses regardless of the course duration.

See the Make a Course Available to Students Blackboard Help page for more information.

Set Up Notifications

On your activity stream's Notification Settings panel, you can choose which notifications you receive activity about in all your courses:

Activity stream: Choose which activities appear on your Stream page.
Email: If you want to receive email notifications, add an email address to your profile page. Then, choose how often and which activities you want to receive notifications for.

Push notifications: If you want to receive push notifications, choose how often and which activities you want to receive notifications for. Messages pop up on your mobile device if you have the Blackboard Instructor mobile app installed.

See the Notification Setting Help page for more information.

Calendar

From the global calendar in the list where your name appears, you can see all your upcoming due dates and meetings across your courses—all in one place.

In your calendar, find this event information:

• Student help hours, course schedule, and events: These appointments appear automatically on the calendar when you add them to a course.
• Due dates: When you create content with a due date, it appears automatically in the calendar.

Check your course calendar

When you access the calendar from inside a course, it shows events for that course only. Select the Calendar tab from the course navigation bar.

The course view of the calendar displays due dates, the course schedule, office hours, and course-specific meetings and events. When you create content with a due date, it appears automatically in the calendar. All events you create within a specific course roll up into the global calendar. You can switch over to the big picture by accessing your global calendar from the list where your name appears.

See the Calendar Help article for more information.

Student Preview

You want to be confident that your course is well-designed and functions as you expect—before your students see it. With student preview, you can review the course content from a student's perspective. You can also validate course behaviors. For example, you can review the conditional release of content and how grades appear.

While in student preview, you can do these student activities:

• Submit assignments
• Take tests
• Download and upload files
• Participate in conversations
• Participate in discussions and journals
• Send course messages
• View grades as a student
• Experience group membership

See the Student Preview Help article for more information.

Course Roles

Course roles control access to the content and tools within a course. Each user is assigned a role for each course they participate in. For example, a user with the role of Teaching Assistant in one course can have the role of Student in another course.

• Instructor - provides access to all areas of the course, including the control panel for posting content, making users available/unavailable, posting grades, and making the course available/unavailable. This role is generally assigned to the person developing, teaching, or facilitating the class and is automatically populated from Campus Connection.
• Teaching Assistant - provides access to everything included with the instructor role, except changing a user's availability.
• Course Builder - has access to most areas of the course. This role is appropriate for an assistant who shouldn't have access to student grades. If the course is unavailable to students, a course builder can still access the course.
• Grader - The Grader role has limited access to the course. Graders can assist an instructor in the creation, management, delivery, and grading of assessments and surveys. The grader may also assist an instructor with adding manual entries. If a course is unavailable to students, the course appears in the course list for a user with the role of Grader.
• Student - this is the default course user role. A user with the role of Student submits coursework and participates in discussions. Students can't create or grade course items. This role is automatically populated by Campus Connection.

Course Settings

Course Settings allow you to customize your course to suit your needs and those of your students. Course Settings appears at the top right corner of an Ultra course if the user has privileges to view or manage settings.

The settings that are included in the Course Settings option include:

Manage Course Duration - defines the time in which students may interact with a course. This is determined by Course Duration settings. The default setting for NDSU courses is Ongoing.

Manage Course Tools - you can manage various tools using Course Settings, including Roster tool and Message tool.

• The Roster option allows the instructor to determine if students can view the course roster. This feature is turned on by default.
• The Messages option allows the instructor to determine if they would like the option for students to use the Messages option to communicate with other students in the course and with the instructor. When turned off, messages will only be sent via email.

Course Banner

As an instructor, you and administrator users can upload an image to be the thumbnail in the Courses page at Base Navigation. It can also be the internal Course Banner inside your Ultra courses.

With course banners you:

• Improve the way your Ultra Course View landing pages appear.
• Improve student engagement and experience.
• Bring consistency between what the Base Navigation displays and the actual course.
• Help your students differentiate between courses and locate course details.
• Make it easier for you to add a course schedule, and for your students to identify course faculty members and class meeting days, times, and location.

The Unsplash image library has been added to Blackboard Ultra. You can search their vast library of royalty-free images to use for your Course Banner as well as in Learning Modules.

See the Course Banner Help article for more information.

Progress Tracking

You can enable this functionality to give your students an easy way to keep track of what they have done inside each one of the courses. When enabling progress tracking later than the beginning of the term, participatory items will be retroactively marked as complete. For example, assessments submitted previously by students will be marked as complete. Non-participatory items, like Ultra documents, will still need to be manually marked by students.

You can enable progress tracking at any time during the term.

See the Progress Tracking Help article for more information.