Building Classes in Blackboard

Blackboard is a course management platform that allows instructors to interact with students and put their classes on the Internet without having to be experts in HTML or web development. From putting up copies of handouts and presentations to quizzing students on what they've learned to calculating student grades and putting them online, Blackboard lets you easily create an electronic companion to your course.

Getting to Blackboard and Logging In

Blackboard at Rutgers-Newark can be accessed, by students, by using any current-generation web browser; but instructors should Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher to go to http://blackboard.newark.rutgers.edu . If you already have an account on the system, you can click on the link to 'Login' and use your username and password to log in.

If you do not yet have an account and you wish to use Blackboard in an upcoming class, you will first need to contact the Office of Academic Technology to have an account activated. To do so, please email oatbb@andromeda.rutgers.edu and provide the following information:

The title of the course, as you would like it to appear to students when they log in
The school, subject, course number, and section of each class (ex.: 2135010101 for section 1 of English 101 in school 21).
The semester and academic year when the course will be offered

Setting Up Your Blackboard Course

In the Course Options, click on 'Settings' and then on 'Course Name and Description' to get to the section where you can set the title, description, and category for your page. The title and category were set up for you when your Blackboard course was created and it is recommended that in most instances, you leave them as they are. But if an error was made in the title of the class, or if you would like to add a description for it, you can go to this section and make the necessary changes.

Back in the main control panel, another link in the Course Options section is one for Manage Course Menu, Click on that to go to the screen where you'll decide which areas are available to students of this course and also decide how those links appear. Those areas that you choose to make unavailable will no longer be linked to on the left-hand side of the main class page.

The Manage Course Menu section of the control panel takes the form of a list of options that you can choose to enable or disable. If you've used Blackboard 5.5 in the past, you'll notice that this interface is somewhat different from the 'Area Availability' interfaced you used to use. One thing that remains the same, though, is that the Announcements section is one we use to send out messages to all users of the system. So in customizing your content areas, please do not remove the 'Announcements' area from your list. And for the purposes of making things easier on your students, please also leave the 'User Tools' section intact.

III. Adding Content to Content Areas

Once we've decided which Content Areas will be available to students in this Blackboard course, let's click on the link for the Control Panel in the breadcrumb near the top of the screen to get back to the main Control Panel page and start adding content to our Content Areas. To do so, you click on the content area that you would like to add (or modify or delete) content in and are taken to the page to do so. Now you should note that some of the areas we'll be adding content to are termed Content Areas, and some are listed among the Course Tools. Truth be told, though, the process for adding content rarely differs dramatically. But let's take a look at how to add content to a few of these areas.

Click on the link for Announcements in the Content Areas section of your control panel. This will take you a summary page of your announcements, by default showing only those announcements posted for the last seven days. To view more of them, you click on the tabs along the top to show just the current day's announcements, the past month-long period's announcements, or all announcements that were posted for the course and are still available in the system. This, you may notice, looks a lot like the Announcements section as it appears on the course page students see. The difference is that you have a link near the top to Add Announcement. Let's click on that link.

Adding Announcements

The Add Announcement page we're taken to, as shown above, is mostly fairly straightforward. You give your announcement a subject and then type in the message and set whether or not it will always show or will show only during a specific timeframe.

Once you have set up the options, as desired, scroll down and click on the Submit button. This may take a moment (or longer, depending on your internet connection), so please do not hit back or refresh until you are taken to the 'receipt page.' Whenever you make a submission to Blackboard, you will be given a confirmation page, called a 'receipt page' in Blackboard, that lets you know your change was successfully submitted. Clicking on 'OK' on this receipt page should take you to the last area you were working in.

So having submitted our announcement and clicked on ok in the receipt page, we're taken back to the Announcements page, which should be showing the announcement we just created.

From here, you can not only keep adding additional announcements; but also Modify or Remove existing ones. Clicking on 'Modify' will take you to a Modify Announcement page that is nearly identical to the Add Announcement page we just went through… and works the same way. Clicking on 'Remove' will ask you to confirm your wish to remove an announcement and then remove it once you have done so.

Adding Course Information, Course Documents, Assignments, and Books

As mentioned above, these four sections are nearly identical in how content is added. So let's just take a look at how to add Course Information and see how it differs from adding announcements.

Here, in the Course Information area page, you will see options to 'Add Item,' 'Add Folder,' 'External Link,' 'Course Link,' 'Test,' and a pulldown box to add such things as 'Learning Units.' An Item can be a document, file, or typed-in information that you wish to share with your students, whether it's a copy of the course syllabus, an introduction to the class, or a PowerPoint presentation that you have made available to your students. A Folder is just that… a folder that contains a series of related items. Links to content within your BB course site and to other web sites can easily be added to this section by clicking on those links, as can tests… no longer requiring that you go in through a separate interface (as had been required in BB 5.5). And finally, a Learning Unit is a topically oriented group of Items and/or Folders… perhaps organized by theme, chapter, or unit.

To add an Item, just click on 'Add Item.'

The first section, Name, lets you either choose from a number of suggested names for items that you might want to have in this section or type in a name/title of your own. You can also control what color the text of that name appears in by simply clicking on 'Pick' to choose a color from a palette.
The text box just below the color option should seem familiar since it works much the same way it did in announcements. Choose how you want your text formatted and type in the information.
If you have any attachments that you wish to accompany the typed-in text of this Item, you can now use the Content Attachments section to find the file on your hard drive, give it a name, control how the link behaves when clicked upon (whether it will be a simple link or one to automatically extract an archive), and see what files, if any, are already attached to this item.
Scrolling down, you will then see the familiar Options to set specific times between which an item appears or leave it at its default of always being available.
And finally, when you have it all set up the way you want it, go ahead and click on 'Submit.'

Adding a folder is not much different in how it works, so we won't repeat the step-by-step instructions. But let's go ahead and create a folder that we would like to place items into. Once you have done so and clicked 'OK,' you will be taken to the Course Information page, which will now show any items and folder that you have created in this Content Area.

As was the case when we were creating announcements, you can choose to Modify or Remove existing items and folders. But we also see some more options here. Just to the left of the name of each Folder (which is identified by the picture of a folder) and Item (which is identified by the picture of a piece of paper), you will see a pull-down box with a number in it. Changing the numbers for each Folder/Item allows you to change the order in which course information is displayed.

You will also notice that while each Item's name is just simple text, the Folder names are underlined and are clickable, as links. Clicking on a Folder name takes you into that folder and allows you to create Items (or subfolders) within them.

And finally, Learning Units work much the same way Folders do. So once again, we won't repeat the step-by-step process of creating one, though you may want go ahead and create one just to practice. Whether or not you use Learning Units (or even Folders), however, is entirely up to you. You may wish to just have Items without placing them within any Folders or Learning Units.

Adding Staff Information

The Staff Information link, among the Course Tools, allows you to put profiles of staff members in for students to access. Blackboard supplies you with a simple form for entering in personal information and uses that to return whatever personal information you choose to supply about instructors and/or other 'staff members.' This content area also has the option of creating Folders, in case you have groups of staff members; but since that works more or less the same way the folders we've already gone over do, we'll just focus on how to create what are called Staff Profiles.

Click on Staff Information, listed among the Content Areas in your control panel.
Click on Add Profile in the Staff Information page.
Fill out the Staff Profile form, supplying whatever information you'd like to share about a given staff member.
Click on 'Submit' to submit your entry and then click 'OK' in the resulting receipt page.

When you're done, you'll be put back on the Staff Information page and will see your entry listed, along with the now-familiar options for modifying and removing entries.

Adding Links

And for the last of the content area styles we'll be looking at, the Online Resources section allows you to share URL's to web sites with your students. This can be used to point to electronic texts or other online resources that can be found online. This works as any other content area would; but its been designed to let you make full use of the 'External Links' option when adding content.

Click on External Link
Fill out the External Link Information form, supplying the URL that you will be pointing to, a name that identifies the link (and supplies the text for the link that students will click on), and a brief description of the link
Choose, in the Options section, whether or not you want the link to be visible (you may choose to hide them until you're ready to share them.
Also in the Options section, choose whether or not you want the link to open in an external window. Otherwise, it will open within the main frame of the current page.
Click on 'Submit' to submit your entry and then click 'OK' in the resulting receipt page.

Course Tools

Having looked at the Content Areas, let's now take a quick look at the section appearing just below them: Course Tools. These tools allow you to communicate with your students more easily, some of which are the following:

Course Calendar: An online calendar that allows you to share important dates and events with your students, from exam dates to due dates on papers. The students, further more, can be given the ability to add personal events that only they will see.
Tasks: This feature can be used to assign and track progress on projects and other assignments
Send Email: This feature makes it easy for you to send email to the students who have access to your online course, whether you want to email them individually or all at once.
Discussion Board: A place for students to have discussions in response to questions/topics or in a looser format.
Collaboration: This lets you conduct live chats with your students/colleagues.
Digital Drop Box: This feature lets you and your students share access to files without having to send emails with text attachments.

User Management

The user management section of the control panel allows you to look up students who currently have access to your course site and modify their permissions to do so. To find a user:

Click on List/Modify Users
Search by username or last name if you are looking for a specific student
Simply click on the search box without typing anything into it to get a full list of participants in the course

Instructors cannot add or remove users in Blackboard 6. If you have questions about adding/removing users, or need a user added/removed, please contact oatbb@andromeda.rutgers.edu for assistance.

Bringing the Class to Life

When you're ready to make your class live, head on back over to 'Settings' by clicking on the link in the 'Course Options' section of your control panel. Here, click on the link for 'Course Availability' and select 'yes' before submitting. Please note that all classes start out set to 'no,' by default (this is what it means when you see 'Unavailable' next to a class listed on your welcome page. This gives you time to set up your class before students can access it.