WOOL Blog: Ram-ping Up Your Instructional Technology

Whether you have just copied over an older course section to current one, as we discussed in our last blog , or you have recently built a course from scratch, chances are you have some tweaking to do with due dates and availability before the Fall. In this post, we will show you the most efficient way of setting up all the date and time criteria in your course using the Data Management tool. Date Management allows you to adjust availability and due date permissions for any Blackboard items currently using them - not only assignments and tests. For example, you can also adjust settings for Announcements, Discussion Boards, Journals, and even folders or modules that have availability parameters. Date management is housed alongside the same course tools you use most often. You will find it about halfway down the list of course tools under the content management pane. Upon selected the tool, you will be presented with three options for adjusting your dates. Use Course Start Dat...

Copy a Course In Blackboard it is possible to copy one course to another using the course copy feature. This is useful if you have designed and developed a course you'd like to use again. Follow these 8 simple steps below to complete your course copy: 1. Open the course that you would like to copy the materials FROM . 2. On the Control Panel of that course (left, blue menu), click on Packages and Utilities. 3. Click Course Copy. 4. The Copy Course screen will appear. Click on the Browse button to select the Destination Course ID. 5. A list of your courses will appear. Select the appropriate destination course that you would like to copy the materials TO . 6. Click the Submit button at the bottom of the window. 7. Click on the Select All button to be sure that you copy ALL of the course materials over to the new or existing course. Otherwise, select only items you would like to copy. Note: You may want to change discussion board option to Inc...

A few weeks ago, we posted instructions for exporting your course gradebooks to keep for your records. This week, we are going to help you take your summer “housekeeping” a step further by detailing how, and why, to export or archive your courses. When you export or archive a course from Blackboard, your course is condensed into a single ZIP folder that you can save to a computer or storage device for safe keeping. In both instances, your course layout, assignments, exams, grading schemas, adaptive release criteria, etc, are preserved within this ZIP folder. This ZIP folder can then be uploaded into Blackboard at a later date to recreate these components. However, archiving and exporting differ in one very important area: exporting a course does not preserve student data, whereas archiving a course does preserve student data. When archiving a course, the final ZIP folder also contains student enrollment, assignment submissions, grades, discussion board and wiki contributions, and ...

It's finally summer! Some of you are enjoying time off, catching up on scholarship, or even teaching summer school. Regardless of your summer plans, it's always good to do a little Blackboard housekeeping before the previous term is too far behind us.  We recommend downloading your Blackboard course gradebook(s) for your records. Just follow these five simple steps below to access and save an Excel file of your course gradebooks. Step 1: Access your the Full Grade Center in your Blackboard Course Step 2: In the top right corner, select Work Offline , and then choose Download. Step 3: Leave all of the settings as is, and select Submit. Step 4: On the following screen, select Download. Step 5: Open your downloaded Excel spreadsheet and save it to your desired location and/or print a copy for your records.