The Blackboard FAQ answers the most common questions and problems users have with Blackboard. If you have a question that is not answered by this page, please submit a ticket.
First, you'll need to choose one section that will become the "master." This is usually section one, but it doesn't matter -- just choose one that you'll use. Then, go into each other section and make it unavailable. To do that, go to the Control Panel and click on "Settings" under the "Course Options" pane. Click on "Course Availability," select "No," and click "OK." Doing this hides the section from the students so that they can't see it and won't accidentally go to the wrong section. Next, go to your master section -- the one that you didn't make unavailable -- and enroll all of the students from the other sections into it. (How do I enroll a student in a course?) Yes, you have to do this manually. It stinks, but saves you a bunch of work in the long run.
This works for combining any two sections -- they don't have to be the same class. For instance, you might want to combine a class and its related lab; same process.
When you combine courses, you are responsible for drops and adds.
The short answer is: you don't. When the year starts, all of your students are already enrolled. After that, adds are processed automatically every night, so you really shouldn't need to enroll anyone manually.
In the unlikely event that you do need to, however, it's pretty easy. From the Control Panel, click on "Enroll User" in the "User Management" pane. Search for the student by last name, check the box next to their name, and click "Submit." Sometimes, the user doesn't appear when you search for them; here's why.
Chances are, the student is already enrolled in your course. Search for them using "List/Modify Users" in the "User Management" pane of the Control Panel. Many times, students are added automatically before an instructor gets a chance to, and Blackboard won't let you enroll the same student twice!
If you've double-checked that the student is, indeed, not enrolled in your course, make sure that you're spelling his or her name right, and that you're using the correct name. If the student started at Wesleyan and then changed his or her name, you might need to search using the older name. If you're absolutely positive the student isn't already enrolled, and still can't find them, submit a ticket.
Blackboard, in an effort to make the user experience as difficult and incongruous as possible, has made adding a new instructor fittingly unintuitive. First, you'll need to enroll the new instructor as a student. Once you've done that, click on "List/Modify Users" in the "User Management" pane of the Control Panel and search for the new instructor. Click on the "Properties" button next to their name. At the bottom, you can select their role in the course; change it to "Instructor" and click "Submit."
Once you've enrolled the user as a student, click on "List/Modify Users" in the "User Management" pane of the Control Panel and search for the user you want to make a student instructor. Click on the "Properties" button next to their name. At the bottom, you can select their role in the course. Here, you can choose which role you want the student instructor to have in your course. A quick rundown:
You can make your student instructors whatever role suits you best.
Go into the source course -- i.e., the one that has the content in it -- and click on "Course Copy" under "Course Options" in the Control Panel. It will prompt you to enter the Destination Course ID, which is something like ORIG-101-01-SP-08. If you can't remember it, you can browse to find it. Check every box in the "Course Materials" section, but don't check the "Enrollments" box. Click "Submit." It will copy the course, but not instantly. Depending on the size of your course, it could take up to an hour. Feel free to grab a coffee, read some Proust, or otherwise pass the time while you're waiting.
No, but I'll do you one better. You can hide them from view, but still be able to access them if you need to. First, click on your "My Wesleyan" tab at the top of the page. In the "My Courses" pane, you'll see all of your courses listed. In the upper-righthand corner of that pane, there's a small icon that looks like a pencil. Click on it. You will now find yourself on a page that lists all of your courses, with several checkboxes next to each one. Go through and uncheck all of the boxes next to each course you don't want to see. Click "Submit" -- and voila! Your old courses are gone from view!
The good news is that you can still access these courses when you need to, e.g., migrate their content to a new course. If you click on the "Courses" tab, you can see that every course is still listed. This page also lists the course ID number (something like BIO-001-02-FA-05) so you can easily determine the section and session of those courses you teach every semester. (If you frequently teach the same course, you might also find it useful to rename the courses.)
At the end of each semester, we automatically make old courses unavailable to students, which hides the courses from them.
From the Control Panel, click on "Settings" in the "Course Options" pane. Click on "Course Name and Description." Change the name to whatever you wish -- bearing in mind that students will need to use the new name to identify the course -- and click "Submit."
Blackboard courses are synchronized directly from the Registrar's databases, so you should ensure that the Registrar knows what courses you are teaching. They will be automatically added to your Blackboard page within 24 hours. You do not need to notify CS/IT, since we will not add your classes on demand.
While we enroll students automatically for you, we currently lack the ability to drop them from the course, so you'll need to do that yourself when a student drops, withdraws, etc. From the Control Panel, click on "Remove User From Course" in the "User Management" pane. Search for the student by last name and check the box next to their name. Type "Yes" (Note the capital "Y"! It's important!) in the box at the bottom and click "Submit."
This is just as much fun as adding an instructor. First, you have to make them a student. To do that, click on "List/Modify Users" in the "User Management" pane of the Control Panel and search for the instructor. Click on the "Properties" button next to their name. At the bottom, you can select their role in the course; change it to "Student" and click "Submit." Now that they're a student, you can drop them from the course as normal.
The Digital Dropbox, a Blackboard feature that allows students to upload files for the instructor to grade, is slated for removal in a future release of Blackboard. What's more, there's a much better way to do things. Consequently, I'm encouraging everyone to move away from using the digital dropbox.
The dropbox is being replaced by the assignments feature. The major improvement is that the documents submitted via the assignments feature are categorized by assignment, whereas the dropbox is just one big wild and woolly repository for everything that gets handed in ever. That means that it's easier to find new submissions, and easier to correlate documents with their assignments. Furthermore, each assignment you create is automatically entered into the gradebook and, since each document is associated with an assignment, entering grades into the Blackboard gradebook is made even easier.
To create a new assignment, go to the Control Panel, and then to the content area you want to add the assignment to -- this is probably "Assignments." Normally, you'd click the "+Item" button. Instead, pull down the drop-down menu on the top right of the page next to the word "Select," choose "Assignment," and click "Go." At this point, you'll just add an item like normal, and click "Submit." (There are some new things in "Options," but you can generally just leave those alone.) If you use the gradebook, then you can set the number of points possible; if not, feel free to ignore that blank.
Once you've created the assignment, you'll see that there's a link under it called "View/Complete Assignment." When students click on that link, they're given a text box so that they can type in a response, and also the option to upload a file, e.g., from Excel.
Once the student has completed the assignment, it will be marked as completed. To view the assignments that have been finished, go to the gradebook. (You'll access them through the gradebook even if you don't use it.) In the column for your assignment, any student with an exclamation point has completed the assignment and awaits grading. Clicking the exclamation point will let you view or download the file and, if you want, enter a grade for it.
If you want to experiment, there is a test student account set up for this very purpose. If you search for a user called 'student' to add to your course, you'll find the account. To login, submit a ticket with the problem type "Blackboard" and ask for the password.
Blackboard reports an email as failing if even one recipient can't be reached. That means that the message you just sent actually worked for most of the people in your class. Generally, we see this happen when there's a user who is no longer a student here, but is still enrolled in a Blackboard course. If you have difficulty determining who the student might be, submit a ticket and we'll help you out.
From the Control Panel of the course you wish to Archive, click the "Archive Course" link in the "Course Options" pane. Click the "Archive" button, and then click "Submit." When the process completes, you will get an email notifying you of such, and you can return to the Control Panel, click "Archive Course" again, and download the package that has been created.