Digital Education Office blog – Page 98 – Service announcements and essential information from the Digital Education Office

Why can’t my student(s) see my course in Blackboard?

Posted on October 8, 2012June 27, 2014 by Hanrahan Highland

All units and programmes are automatically created as courses in Blackboard, and all students automatically enrolled, based on the registration data held in SITS. If some students can’t see a particular course in Blackboard:

• First, check the course is available. If under “My courses” on your Blackboard Home page you see “unavailable” after the course, this means the course is unavailable to students. To make it available, follow the instructions in ‘What does course “unavailable” mean and how can I make a course available?’

• Second, if the course IS available, check the student is enrolled on it. Go into the course, and in the Control Panel, click Users and Groups, then Users. Change the middle search box to “Not blank” and click on Go. Search for their name in the list. If the student is not enrolled, they should check if they are registered for it in My Students. If you need to manually enrol a student see ‘How do I enrol a student on my course?’

Why can’t I see a Blackboard course for a unit I am teaching?

Posted on October 8, 2012June 27, 2014 by Tel Team

All units and programmes are automatically created as courses in Blackboard, and all students automatically enrolled, based on the registration data held in SITS. However, staff are not automatically enrolled, since staffing data is not centrally available.

Any Instructor on a course can enrol another Instructor onto that course, and local Blackboard System Administrators can do the same – so please check if a colleague can enrol you. Instructions on how to enrol an Instructor are in this FAQ.

If another Instructor or a local Blackboard System Administrator cannot enrol you, please email tel-help@bristol.ac.uk and ask to be enrolled as an Instructor, giving the unit ID.

Staff Access to 2011-12 courses

Posted on October 1, 2012June 27, 2014 by Tel Team

As of Friday 28th of September we have completed the course rollover process. Last year’s courses have now been hidden from members of staff. Those staff that have requested continued access to last year’s courses will see them reappear during the morning of October 1st as we go through the requests and switch them back on. if you have requested access to a course from last year and you don’t see it by the end of October 1st, please let us know.

More information on the rollover is available on the TEL website.

Staff wishing to have access to last year’s courses should complete this form and send it to TEL help.

Course Rollover and Adaptive Release

Posted on September 27, 2012October 11, 2012 by Joseph Gliddon

Regrettably the course copy process for the summer rollover did not copy the adaptive release rules for materials in Units. There are about 200 Units affected we have now reapplied the rules for them. This only applies to SITS Units.

One thing to be aware of, a lot of the adaptive release was simply to be visible after a particular date – as all of these dates were last year the items were visible so we have not re-applied these rules.

Adaptive Release is a useful function in that it allows things to be visible to students if they meet the requirements (normally getting a particular score in a test or being part of a group).

Blackboard “Alignments”

Posted on August 17, 2012 by Hanrahan Highland

The latest version of Blackboard has a new feature that allows staff to set “Goals” for their Courses, and then add “Alignments” between items in the Courses and these Goals. Unfortunately, references to Alignments appear in various places even when Goals have not been set – notably, on students’ My Grades pages, and at the top of any Content page created as a “Blank Page”. We have requested that Blackboard issue a patch that will enable us to remove these; until this time, please just ignore them – they have no effect when not associated with Goals.

Upgrading your materials from Campus Pack 3 to 4

Posted on August 17, 2012August 17, 2012 by Tel Team

If your courses contain materials created in Campus Pack (wikis, blogs and podcasts) the first time the link is clicked following the upgrade on the 17th August it will automatically update from the old version of the tool to the new.

To do this the following steps are requried –

Click View