Getting your Blackboard course ready – Part 1

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As we are approaching the beginning of a new academic year, many of you may be in the process of preparing your course areas on Blackboard before the start of teaching. This article is the first of two detailing the key tasks that you will need to undertake to ensure that everything runs smoothly. These articles cover:

1. General tasks: for example checking student enrolments are set up correctly and ensuring the relevant staff have access to the course area
2. Preparing content: ensuring the contents of the course area are updated for the new student cohort.

This article assumes that you have Instructor (Teach tab) access to your course area

General checklist

Before even looking at the contents of a course area, there are a number of general tasks that you should carry out to ensure the course is appropriately set up

General Tasks
1	Student access: Ensure that your course is set up correctly for student enrolment. Check whether your course is enrolling automatically or manually and that enrolment information is correct.
2	Staff access: Ensure that all staff who need access to the course area have it and there is noone who has access who shouldn’t
3	Course listing: Ensure the way the course appears in the course listing on the Blackboard home page is as you want it. Are the correct Instructors listed?
4	Getting help: Make sure you know where your students should go if they require help and find out what help is available to you too.

Further details on what you need to do for each of these points are provided in the rest of this article.

Checking student access

One of the most important things to check is that the correct students will be able to get access to your course area. Your course area will either be automatically or manually enrolled. Automatic enrolment uses data from the central student record system (SRS) to determine who should be given access to your course. Manual enrolment means you must manage student enrolment yourself through the Grade Book tool in the course area.

To check how your course area is enrolling students, please go to the course listing page on our online support site on: http://www.esd.qmul.ac.uk/vle/courselisting.shtml. Use the Find function on your browser to look for your course. The entry in the "SRS Enrolment?" column will show how your course area is currently set up to handle student enrolment.

If your course is listed as being set for automatic enrolment, you should take a moment to check the "Who is automatically enrolled?" column to ensure that enrolment is correctly configured. Pay particular attention to any potential errors in the codes used for enrolment. If you are unsure how this works, there are some examples below to help you.

If your course is listed as being set for manual enrolment then you are expected to handle enrolment yourself. No students will have access to the course area automatically.

If there is a problem with the enrolment details for your course, please get in contact with us as soon as possible on vle-support@qmul.ac.uk.

Automatic enrolment examples

There are a number of ways that course areas can be set to enrol students, by module code, programme code or by department. There are some examples of each of these below.

This course is automatically enrolled using several module codes. Students enrolled centrally on any of these module codes will be automatically given access to the Blackboard course area. If your course is enrolling on module codes, please ensure that the correct codes are included. Particular care is needed with courses that may have associate students on them. These students are usually enrolled centrally on slightly different codes (ending in A or B). If these codes are not included in the enrolment information these students will not get access to the course area on Blackboard.

This course area is enrolling students based on their programme of study and developmental year. Notice how some programmes have all developmental years enrolled and others only have specific developmental years. If your course is enrolling on programme codes, please ensure the correct codes and developmental years are being used.

This course area is enrolling by department. Any student who is registered as taking at least one module in the Geography Department will be enrolled onto this course area.

Checking staff access

It is important that you check who has access to your course area, particularly if you are taking over a course area from someone else. You may be unaware of the fact that other people may have access to the course area as Instructors, Designers, Teaching Assistants or Auditors. You can check who has access to your course area by using the Grade Book. Click on the Teach tab and then click on the Grade Book tool in the Instructor Tools menu. Now click on the Members tab. Here you will see a listing of all the people who have access to your course area and the type of access that they have (the Role column). Look for anyone who is enrolled as an Instructor, Designer, Teaching Assistant or Auditor. You can sort the display on the Role column by clicking on the title to make it easier to see the various roles.

If there are people who have access that shouldn’t, you can unenrol them from the course area through the Grade Book. Check the box next to their name and click the Unenrol button. If there are other members of staff who require access, you can enrol them (you will have to know their Blackboard user name). The only exception is if you need a member of staff to have Instructor access to your course area. In this case you will have to request this through the VLE support team on vle-support@qmul.ac.uk.

A quick reminder about roles and access:

• Instructor – this gives someone access to the Teach tab. It is worthwhile to think about whether someone really needs Instructor access or whether Teaching Assistant access will do (TA access also give access to the Teach tab). As it is the highest level of access to a course area you cannot enrol someone onto your course area as an Instructor yourself.
• Designer – this level of access gives a person access to the Build tab. If someone needs to upload files to the course area, they’ll need Designer access.
• Teaching Assistant – by default, this level of access is essentially the same as Instructor, it gives access to the Teach tab however TAs cannot enrol other people onto the course area as Instructors can. Instructors can further restrict the types of tasks TAs can carry out should they want to however by default TA access is almost the same as Instructor access.
• Auditor – this is essentially the same access as a Student would have. It is useful for allowing other members of staff to see your course area without being able to make any changes or to see any student data such as grades.

Check the course listing

The screen shot above shows how courses appear on the Blackboard home page. You should check how your course looks in the course listing by looking at your own Blackboard home page. In particular, are the Instructors that are shown correct? Anyone who is enrolled as an Instructor on the course area can be displayed on the course listing or you can choose not to display any instructor names at all. As this is how students will see your course area in their course listing it is important that the instructor listing is accurate.

Unfortunately, you do not have control over who is displayed here yourself. If you wish to have changes made, please email us on vle-support@qmul.ac.uk and we will make the changes for you.

For the majority of courses areas on Blackboard the title that appears in the course listing is taken from the central student record (SRS) system. If your course is on automatic enrolment and the title is incorrect then you will have to contact Student Administration to have the information on the SRS changed.

Getting help and information

Students

Support for students is provided through our online support site on http://www.esd.qmul.ac.uk/vle/students/. It is very important that students are guided to this site in the first instance. There is a variety of information on the site including a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section. There is also an online form through which they can submit a query to the VLE Support team. It is especially useful if students can be directed to the online form as it enables us to gather all the information we require to try to deal with their query as quickly as possible.

Staff

There is a staff section on our online support site on http://www.esd.qmul.ac.uk/vle/staff/. This section provides a variety of resources such as printable guides and movies of common tasks carried out with Blackboard. There is also a link to our online form which can be used to submit a query to the VLE Support team.

The VLE Support team is made up of members of the Distance and E-Learning Unit, based in the Educational and Staff Development Department. All queries regarding Blackboard should be sent to vle-support@qmul.ac.uk rather than to individual members of the Distance and E-Learning Unit. This email address is monitored on a rota system by the team and is the best way to ensure your query is answered promptly particularly if individual members are busy or out of the office.

There are a variety of channels through which we publish important information about the Blackboard service, in particular information about scheduled downtimes or information about any known issues with the running of the system. These are called "VLE Service Announcements" and you will find them on the Blackboard home page, the home page of our online support site on http://www.esd.qmul.ac.uk/vle/” and on the home page of our web site on http://www.esd.qmul.ac.uk/elearning. If you use an RSS reader, then you can also subscribe to the VLE Service Announcements RSS feed meaning you will keep up to date with important information about the running of the service. We strongly recommend that you keep aware of the information in these announcements and let us know at the earliest opportunity if issues such as scheduled service outages might cause you any problems e.g. a clash with an assignment submission date.

We also offer a number of development opportunities for staff who wish to learn more about using Blackboard. These include:

• Introduction to QM’s Virtual Learning Environment – aimed at academic staff or teaching assistants new to the VLE
• The College’s VLE for Support Staff – aimed at staff in academic support who may be expected to deal with queries about the VLE as part of their job
• VLE Diagnostics Service – one-to-one sessions aimed at staff who already have a course area on Blackboard.
• TurnitinUK and the VLE – Plagiarism detection in the VLE – aimed at staff interested in using an electronic plagiarism detection service through Blackboard.

Details on all of these sessions can be found on our course booking system on http://www.esdcourses.org.uk/

If you cannot attend a face-to-face session then we can also provide you with a "Getting Started" course on Blackboard itself which will take you through some of the more common tasks. If you would like a "Getting Started" course then please contact us on vle-support@qmul.ac.uk

Photo credit

Nictalopen on flickr

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