Make Blackboard courses available to students

As an Instructor, if under “My Courses” on your Blackboard home page  you see “not currently available” or “unavailable” after the course name, this means the course is unavailable to students. Instructors can still access and edit the course.

Once your course is ready for students to use, ensure that it is made available as follows:

  • Click on the course
  • Under Control Panel, click on Customisation
  • Click on Properties
  • In section 3, Set availability, select Yes
  • Click Submit

Your course is now available to students.

You can also use the Qwickly tool on your Blackboard Home page (this does not currently work for Hub courses). Click Course Availability and turn the On/Off button next to the course to the required state.

Critical Dates

 

We are currently collecting information on critical activities for Blackboard and QuestionMark Perception for this coming academic year. Critical activities are those for which it is essential that TEL systems such as Blackboard or QMP are available, such as assignment submissions or online exams.

Critical activity information is very important as it is used to schedule downtime for essential maintenance to Blackboard, QMP and other systems with the least disruption to you and your students. The information also helps us and IT Services to more effectively support students and staff in the event of an unexpected disruption to Blackboard, QMP, Turnitin or related services (such as MyBristol). 

Please click this link http://tinyurl.com/zjb8szf and follow the instructions outlined in the form to send us the required information.

Thank you very much

TEL team

Training available on Blackboard and related topics

There are still places on our staff workshops for the new academic year:
Course design – 13 September, 27 September, 11 October
Intro to Blackboard (academic and research staff) – 12 October, 10 January
Intro to Blackboard (admin and support staff) – 6 October, 19 January
Materials design – 14 September, 28 September, 11 October
Media in teaching – 21 September, 5 October, 18 January
Question design – 14 October

Full details and booking: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/tel/noticeboard/

If there isn’t a workshop scheduled that meets your needs or if you would like tailored training please get in touch at tel-help@bristol.ac.uk

New look for Blackboard

Subject to final testing we are planning to change the look of Blackboard to bring it in line with other University websites and systems. You will notice a cleaner feel to the home screen and a new colour scheme, however the layout of your home page will remain the same.

sshot (click image to expand)

 

Hub Courses 2016/17

We have now completed the recreation of Hub courses for the new academic year. Thank you for the information you sent through, it helped make the process smoother at our end. Please could you check the hub courses are set up as expected and carry out your usual maintenance. Check staff and student enrolment and let us know if you spot any issues.
We would appreciate you communicating how Hubs are working to all staff and students, so they know where to find specific resources eg: where to find eReserves, Mediasite etc.
We had planned to set up a parent and merged child style course system, but the complexity of hub courses has stopped this approach. Instead we have kept the Hubs as they were last year, as stand alone courses. This allows for access to Mediasite, submission points and ereserves.
When searching for a unit code in Blackboard you should now see both the SITS generated course and the Hub. The new hubs are using the child unit codes as their Blackboard code to aid searching for them