For Faculty

Copyright

A guide to provide faculty, staff, and students with an understanding of copyright law and fair use.

Click on the links to watch videos on the following Blackboard topics:

• Creating Announcements 
• Creating a Course Contact
• Sending Blackboard Messages 
• Uploading One or More Files to Your Course  
• Make Your Course Available to Students
• Creating a Mashup 
• Creating a Discussion Board Forum
• Grading a Discussion Board Forum
• Rating Discussion Board Threads
• Creating a Group
• Creating and Editing Journal Entries
• Customizing the Grade Center View
• Associating a Rubric with a Gradable Item
• Creating a Test
• Uploading Test Questions from Microsoft® Excel
• Building a Pool
• Creating a Random Block and Adding It to a Test

Manage My Courses

Courses are not removed from Blackboard unless requested by the instructor. This way you can access old courses at any time even if they are listed as unavailable. You may arrange the window to only display the current semester courses.

1. Click on My Classes tab
2. Click on the gear icon in the top right corner
3. On the list of courses, you can uncheck the Display Course Name column to remove them from the display.
4. Click Submit to save your changes.

Print a Course Roster

Instructors may wish to print a course roster for use in a face-to-face class or for recording attendance.

1. Log into Blackboard
2. Click the course where you wish to print the class roster.
3. Under the Control Panel (located on the bottom left), click "Users & Groups."
4. Click "Users"
5. In the search area use the two drop down menus to create the following.
   Search: last name NOT BLANK > click on GO

Making a Course Available

You can make your course or organization available or unavailable. Changing the availability will prevent users from entering the site.

1. In the Control Panel, click Customization > Properties.
2. Set the availability to "Yes" and then choose "Submit."

Note: When a course is set to unavailable, it is invisible to students, but the instructor can still access it.

Creating a Backup of the Grade Book

IT does a system-wide backup on a daily basis. However, these backups are for catastrophic system failure and do not apply at the singular course level. It is the instructor's responsibility to backup their grade book.

• Export your Grade Center for every course both once a week and after making significant changes. Save the file on your computer.
• Export your Grade Center anytime you drop a student so that you have a record of their grades.

Saving (Exporting) the Blackboard data

1. Starting on the opening page of the course, in the Control Panel, expand the Evaluation option
2. Select Grade Center
3. From the drop-down menu labeled Work Offline, select Download