In the past, people have asked how to set things up on Blackboard so that students have to accept some terms and conditions before they can access a particular piece of content. This can be done with a combination of an Assessment (i.e. a quiz) and the Selective Release functionality. This article describes what this solution looks like and goes through the steps required to achieve it.

Following the steps outlined should take no more than 15 minutes. Once you understand the concepts covered here, there are many different ways in which this can be tailored for different situations.
Even if you are not interested in using this particular solution yourself, going through it should provide you with useful general information about the Selective Release function and the Grade Book in Blackboard which may well be of interest.

To try out the solution described here, you will have to have Designer and Instructor access to a course area on Blackboard. If you would like to try it out somewhere other than a "live" course area, get in touch and we can set you up with a test area which you can use to try things out.

This article is made up of the following sections:

• What the solution looks like
• How to do it
  Step-by-step instructions on how to set up the solution in your own Blackboard course area. Including:
  • Uploading the file
  • Creating the quiz
  • Setting the selective release on the document
  • Setting the selective release on the quiz
• Testing the solution
• How it works

What the solution looks like

When the student enters the course area, they see a Terms and Conditions icon.

Clicking on this icon takes them to a Blackboard quiz.

They then click the Begin Assessment button and start the quiz.

They read the text given in the question and then choose a response. The question text is where the exact wording of the terms and conditions should be put. In this case, they have selected the "I do not accept the terms and conditions" option. They then click the Save Answer button and then the Finish button.

They see the quiz submission screen as seen above. If they then click on the Course Content button to return to the course Home Page, they will see the following:

Notice that all they can see on the course Home Page is the same Terms and Conditions quiz.

They can take the quiz again by clicking on the icon and then clicking the Begin Assessment button.

This time, they choose the "I accept the terms and conditions" option, click the Save Answer button and then the Finish button. Once their quiz has been successfully submitted, they can click on the Course Content item on the Course Tools menu to return to the course Home Page.

Now they have access to the appropriate document and they no longer have access to the Terms and Conditions quiz.

With this solution, students can take the Terms and Conditions quiz as often as they like but as long as they answer "I do not accept the terms and conditions" they will not be able to access the document. Once they have accepted the terms and conditions, they will have access to the document but they will not be able to take the quiz again.

How to do it

This section outlines the steps required to set up the solution described in the previous section. It is made up of the following steps:

1. Uploading the file – put the file you are restricting access to into the course area
2. Creating the quiz - set up a quiz to allow the students to read the terms and conditions and then choose to accept or reject them
3. Setting the selective release on the document - control visibility of the document so that only those that have accepted the terms and conditions can see it
4. Setting the selective release on the quiz – make sure that the quiz is only available to those students who have never taken it or who have rejected the terms and conditions

Uploading the file

First of all, you will have to upload the "copyright" document to the course area.

Ensure you are on the
Build tab, then click on the File Manager item in the Designer Tools menu.

Now click on the Get Files button to upload your document to the course area. Clicking the
Get Files button will allow you to upload the required file from your computer. If you are just trying this out, just upload any document to the course area, it can be a Microsoft Word document, a PDF file, anything you like.

The uploaded file will appear in the file manager screen but will not be visible to students.

Creating the quiz

The next stage is to create a quiz (called an Assessment in Blackboard) to provide the students with a mechanism for accepting or rejecting the terms and conditions.

Check you are on the Build tab and the click on the Assessments tool in the Course Tools menu. Click the Create Assessment button.

You will then be presented with the Create Assessment screen.

Type a title for the Assessment into the text field, here I’ve called it "Terms and Conditions". When you click out of the field, you will notice that the Grade Book Column name field is automatically populated with the same title.

Make sure the Type is set to Quiz then click the Save button.

You will be returned to the Assessments listing screen where you will see your new Assessment. By default, Assessments are created hidden, so students will not be able to see this Assessment yet.

Now click on the blue underlined text Terms and Conditions (if you gave your quiz a different title, the text will be different here).

You will notice that there are currently no questions in the assessment so you will have to create one. Click on the Create Questions button, you will see a drop down menu, select the Multiple Choice item. You will now see the Create Multiple Choice Question screen.

There’s a lot of information on this screen but there are only a few areas that we are concerned with here:

1. The question title and text – the question title is a required item but it doesn’t really matter what you put in here. The question text is where you should put the details of the terms and conditions. You can use HTML (hypertext markup language) to format the text if you so require.
2. Select mode – this should be set to One answer
3. The answers – we need to set up two answers for the students to choose from, one if the student accepts the terms and conditions and one if they don’t. Enter appropriate text for each case. For the “Accept” one, we also need to check the box next to Correct response.

Scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click the Save button.

You will be returned to the Assessment screen where you will see your newly created question. You will notice that 10 points have automatically been assigned for this question. Although we don’t actually care about grading this question, you will see later why the points value is actually important.

Now click on the downward pointing arrow next to the Terms and Conditions text.

Select the Edit Properties item from the drop down list. You will now see the Edit Assessment Properties screen.

Again, there’s a lot of information on this page but we only have to concern ourselves with a few areas.

In the Question Delivery section, uncheck the item for Display Question Titles.

In the Attempts section, set the number of attempts allowed to Unlimited

In the Student Score section, ensure the Do not release the score option is selected and set the score display to Last.

Scroll down and click the Save button.

Setting the selective release on the document

Now, we want to set up a link to the document but ensure that link is only available to those students who have accepted the terms and conditions.

Go to the Home Page of your course area by clicking on the Course Content item in the Course Tools menu. Click on the Add File button. Click the Browse for Files option from the drop down menu.

Make sure the Class Files icon is selected and then check the box next to the file that you originally uploaded. Click OK.

You will be returned to the course Home Page where you will see an icon representing your file. This icon is currently visible to all students so you need to hide it.

Click the downward pointing arrow to the right of the file title. Select the Hide Item item from the drop down menu. The icon is now hidden from the students.
Now click on the Selective Release tool in the Designer Tools menu

You will see the Selective Release Map screen with a table of items in it. Linked to the Home Page item you should see the item that you added to the Home Page. Click the Set Release Criteria button to the right of this item.

On the Set Release Criteria screen click on the Add Grade Book Criteria button.

Select Terms and Conditions from the drop down list under Criteria. Select Equal to from the condition drop down and enter 10 into the value field. Remember that there were 10 points assigned to the correct answer in our quiz? This is where it’s important. If the student selected the "Accept" option then they will have been awarded 10 points and this condition will be true so the document will be released to them. If, they select the "Don’t Accept" option then they will be awarded 0 points and this condition will not be true so they won’t get access to the document.

Click on the Save button.

You will be back on the Set Release Criteria for screen and you should see your criteria in the list. Now click the Save button.

You are returned to the Selective Release Map screen where you should see some text in the Release Criteria column for the document.
Now click on the Course Content item in the Course Tools menu to go to the home page.

You will see that the document icon now has (Hidden + Conditional) against it. Now we have the selective release criteria set on the document we can unhide it, the selective release function will ensure that the icon is only visible to the appropriate students.

This is done by clicking the downward pointing arrow next to the title and selecting Show Item from the drop down menu.

Although the message states that the item has been made visible to students, it actually hasn’t. This is because there is a selective release criteria set on the item and therefore the item still isn’t visible. You can check that this is true by clicking on the Student View tab to see how students will see your course area.

Notice that the document icon is not visible. It will not become visible until the student takes the quiz and selects the "Accept" option.

Setting the selective release on the quiz

Now we want to make a link to the quiz to allow the students to accept or reject the terms and conditions.

You do this by clicking the Add Content Link button and selecting the Assessments item. You will then be presented with a list of the Assessments that are available in the course area and you should select the Terms and Conditions one that you set up earlier. Click the Add Selected button.

You will now see an icon for the quiz placed on the Home Page. Note that it is still hidden from students, as shown by the text Hidden.

There is one thing left to do. Once a student has done the quiz and selected the “Accept” answer we don’t want them to be able to do the quiz again (or else they could revoke their acceptance of the terms and conditions having already had access to the document which would leave us in a potentially awkward situation!). We do this by setting another selective release criteria on the Quiz itself. This is a very similar process to the one we went through earlier to set up the selective release criteria on the document.

Click on the Selective Release tool in the Designer Tools menu.

You will see the Terms and Conditions quiz item in the listing. Click on the Set Release Criteria button to the right of the line containing this item.

Now click on the Add Grade Book Criteria button.

We want the Quiz itself to be visible to anyone who hasn’t answered "Accept" so this means that they will have a score less than 10 for the Quiz. So select Terms and Conditions from the Criteria drop down, Less than from the Condition drop down and put 10 in the Value field.

Now click the Save button.

You will see your new criteria in the list.

However, we also have to allow for another situation. We have to allow for the situation where the student has not taken the quiz at all yet. In this case, the entry in the Grade Book for the Terms and Conditions quiz will be "Blank". So, we have to set another criteria on the Quiz.

Click on the Add Grade Book Criteria button again.

This time, select Terms and Conditions from the Criteria drop down list and select Blank from the Condition drop down.

Now click the Save button.

You should now see that you have two selective release criteria listed. You then need to select Or from the drop down menu on the second condition. This is because you want the Quiz to be visible to students who either have scored less than 10 in previous attempts (i.e. chosen the "I do not accept" option) OR have not taken the Quiz at all yet (in which case their score will be "Blank").

Now click on the Save button.

You will be returned to the Selective Release Map screen where you will see there is now some text in the Release Criteria column for the Terms and Conditions item indicating a selective release has been set.

Click on the Course Content item in the Course Tools menu to go to the course Home Page.

Now you’ll notice that the icon for the quiz has (Hidden and Conditional) on it. The final step is to make this visible to the students.

Click on the downward pointing arrow at the end of the text on the quiz icon.

Select the Show Itemitem from the drop down menu.

Once again, the message indicates that the icon is now visible to all students. In this case it is as the students will not have taken the quiz yet.
If you want to see how this looks to students now, click on the Student View tab.

Now you can see that the student can only see the quiz icon.

Testing the solution

Now you have finished setting everything up, you can check that the solution works.

Click on the Student View tab then on the Terms and Conditions quiz icon and take the quiz. Select the "I don’t accept option", return to the Home Page of the course area and you’ll see that you can still see the quiz icon but you can’t see the document.

Take the quiz again and click the "Accept" option. Return to the Home Page. Now you’ll be able to see the document icon but the quiz icon will be gone.

If you want to test things again, you’ll have to reset the quiz submission for the Demo Student (this is the account that is used when you’re on the Student View tab). Click on the Teach tab and then on the Assessment Manager tool in the Instructor Tools menu.

Here you can see that the Terms and Conditions quiz has been taken 3 times by the Demo Student (the Student View tab). The first two times, the "I do not accept the terms and conditions" option was chosen (hence the 0 score) and the last time the "I accept" option was chosen, giving a score of 10. To reset the submissions, check the box next to the Demo Student name and then click the Reset Entire Submission button.

If you click on the Student View tab and go back to the course Home Page, you’ll notice the icon for the quiz has re-appeared and the document has disappeared. Now you can test again.

How it works

Although it requires a lot of steps to set up, what is happening here is actually quite simple.

The pivotal part is a number in the Grade Book in the course area.

If you click on the Teach tab and then the Grade Book tool in the Instructor Tools menu you will see what the Grade Book looks like. You will see a column called Terms and Conditions which holds the scores for each of the students enrolled on the course area. It is this value that we have been using to control access to our document.

As its name suggests, the Grade Book is intended to be used for managing student grades however even if you never intend to manage your student grades through Blackboard it still has useful functionality. It is like having a spreadsheet in your course area. As you can see in the screenshot above, the Grade Book contains a row for each person enrolled on the course area. This includes people enrolled in roles other than Student. Columns in the Grade Book are either created automatically, as was the case when we created our quiz…a Grade Book column was automatically created for it. Or they can be created manually, e.g. you might create a column called “Attendance” into which you input a value for a student’s attendance record. Values in the Grade book columns can also either be automatically populated…e.g. by the student submitting a quiz, by uploads from third-party applications such as the TurnitIn audience voting system, or they can be manually entered by anyone with access to the Grade Book. However they get into the Grade Book, these values can then be used in the Selective Release tool to control access to course content.

In this case, we have used a quiz to populate the Grade Book with a value which we have then used to control the visibility of a document. Selective Release can be used to control access to a variety of course content, documents, quizzes, discussion forums, web links, media libraries etc. The Selective Release function can also be used with non-grade book criteria such as dates and times, group membership, role and specific usernames providing a variety of ways in which course leaders can control access to course content.