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As an Instructor, if under “My courses” on your Blackboard home page  you see “not currently available” or “unavailable” after the course, 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.

Or use the Qwickly tool on your home page

Click Course Availability and turn the On/Off button next to the course to the required state.

The Blackboard course roll-over is now complete.  You will see a new Blackboard course for every SITS unit that is running next year – these are in the format HISP21309_2015

You will find it much easier to distinguish between courses for different academic years by using these instructions “Group your courses by year: learn how to simplify your My Courses in 18 seconds.”

All new courses are created as “Unavailable” so students will not be able to see them yet.  When you wish to switch them on simply look for the course availability on the “Qwickly” module on the home page of Blackboard and switch the course to “On”.

Also this year you will see an additional hidden menu item at the bottom of your menu called “Reading List”.  From this menu you will be able to upload your reading list for library staff to access it and when the reading list has been uploaded it will appear on the page for students to see.  See this message from the library

“A reminder that the University is undertaking an early implementation of a reading list management policy, as reading lists are currently provided to students and library staff in a variety of ways leading to inconsistent student experience. The early implementation uses Blackboard to help provide reading lists  in a uniform manner. More information can be found using the ereserves/reading list tab in Blackboard.” 

All staff will have been added to the new versions of courses that they were attached to last year.  Students are being added as they are enrolled on SITS.

We also provide “Hub” courses for areas where more than one Unit code of students are being taught together – we are in the process of copying last years Hub courses and these should be available early next week.

Dear All

Recently Java released a new version for all webbrowsers, it has some security updates and one of these prevents people from uploading multiple files to blackboard content system.

Everything works fine while you open the upload and drag the files over.  However when you click the submit button nothing happens.  Blackboard corp have designed an update to resolve this problem – we will apply this update as soon as practical.

There are however ways that you can get around the problem now

1. using single file upload (look in the top right when you are uploading and you can toggle from multiple to single file)
2. Reduce the security level of your java (and then next week return it to its normal setting)

If you wish to reduce your java security level, click start, all programs, java, configure java.  A box should appear called “Java Control Panel”, click the security tab and set the security level down to medium.  Obviously this leaves your computer less secure and so you should return the setting to high when you have finished working with Blackboard.

Update – our Chrome browsers are set to auto update  the workaround using the lowering of security setting might not work with Chrome version that was released Friday afternoon, however if you use IE it will work fine

Regards

Joseph Gliddon – Learning Technologist

You can add your Blackboard calendar to Google as follows:

1. Click on your name in the top right of Blackboard
2. Click on the calendar icon
3. In the bottom left of the Calendar you will see a link called “Get External calendar link”. Click on this
4. Copy the link (Ctrl + C  or Cmd + C for Mac)
5. Open your Google calendar
6. Under “Other calendars” on the left click the drop down arrow
7. Choose “Add by URL” and paste in the link (Ctrl + V or Cmd + V for Mac), then click “Add Calendar”
8. Please note the calendar name may appear initially as a long URL (web address) , but this will then change to University of Bristol.
9. You may wish to change the Calendar name “University of Bristol” e.g. to Blackboard . To do this click the dropdown to the right of the calendar and select Calendar settings, then edit the name and Save.

Please note that any editing of events has to be done in Blackboard.