The new academic year has begun, and many students are eagerly trying to access their courses on Blackboard. When we rolled the SITS-linked courses over from last year, we made them unavailable to students, so that staff could make any changes they wanted to before releasing them to a new cohort. Once a course is ready for students to use, you should ensure that it is made available to them, 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 the enrolled students.
You can also do this faster, for multiple courses at once, by using the new “Qwickly” module on the Home tab:
- Click “Course Availability”
- Click the On/Off button next to the correct course.
Note that SITS-linked 2014-15 courses are still available to both staff and students – this is a change from previous years where they have been made unavailable. If you wish to stop your students having access to previous years courses for any reason, simply make them unavailable using the method above.
One other thing you will want to do is organise your courses by year (so you don’t accidentally edit the old courses) fortunately this can be done in a couple of clicks –
Move your mouse to the top right of the My Courses box on your Blackboard home page and click on the small cog wheel icon. On the page that opens, under “1. Terms”, tick “Group by Term”, then click on “Submit”. Note that you can also choose which courses and terms you want displayed, and whether you want to see course names, course IDs, or both. (Here is a 45-second video on how to use group courses using terms.)