Organizing course listings as they appear in Blackboard

Here's a solution to the problem of instructors seeing multiple courses with the same exact name and not being able to easily differentiate between old and current courses. This solution empowers the professor to make changes that need to be made at the instructor's convenience. It also lets CIT keep the course shells intact so that they can be migrated Blackboard 6.x and then address the archival issue. It takes a few minutes to follow the instructions listed to clear up the confusion. The instructions are given in the form of an example.

Let's say that a professor teaches Art History (course ART100.SP04) in the Spring of 2004 and had also taught the same course in the Spring of 2003 (ART100.SP03). The instructor requests a new course shell for the 2004 term (the new course shell can be either a new, blank shell or a rollover from the previous year's course shell). Now the professor sees 2 instances of Art History in the "Courses you are teaching" section of the main page in Blackboard. This can be confusing because the titles of the courses do not clearly identify which course is for which semester. In order to clear up the confusion, the instructor can rename the old course title to make it easier to work with the new course shell. Listed below are the instructions which assume that instructor has successfully logged into Blackboard and has identified which course is the 'old' course.

• Select the 'old' course from "Courses you are teaching" from the main page.
• Select the Control Panel.
• Select Course Settings from the Course Options section.
• Select Course Properties.
• The professor can now change the name of the course to a different name that is meaningful for the professor. As an example an Art instructor might change the Course Description to "Spring 2003 Art History".
• Click the Submit button at the bottom of the page.
• After 5 clicks, typing in 12 characters, and then 1 more click, the instructor has cleared up confusion when looking at his/her course listing on the main page.

† designates viewable on Moravian's Intranet - on campus only

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Last Update:
October 26, 2009