What has to happen at the start of term
Contents |
Purpose
The following is a brief summary about what has to happen at the start of term in order for a Blackboard course website to be available and ready for students. It lists who is responsible for each task and has some pointers to information about how to perform or check some tasks.
The summary is
- The faculty will specify who is teaching/coordinating/developing the course.
- The course coordinator/developer will specify which LMS the course will use.
- The Blackboard course site will be created automatically as an empty course that is unavailable to students.
- The course coordinator or developer is responsible for copying or placing content into the course site.
- The course coordinator or developer is responsible for making the course available to students.
If you have any further questions, please
- Read the following information.
- Take a look at help pages.
- Contact helpdesk
When are Blackboard course sites created?
Blackboard course sites are created automatically. They are created as soon as the information about "which LMS" the course is using is set to Blackboard. Staff are able to modify the Blackboard course sites as soon as "Who's teaching what" information is placed into the Academic Staff Allocation system.
This means a T3, 2009 course site could be created now, if the appropriate information were entered into the right databases.
Which LMS?
Responsibility: The faculty/course developer/course coordinator
Background: Someone must specify which learning management system (LMS) the course will use. Currently this can be Blackboard, Webfuse or neither.
Checking which LMS is set: You can see what, if any LMS, your course is recorded as using for T3, 2008 on this page. This shows a list of all courses offered in the term. To find a course, hit CTRL-F (Apple-F on a Mac) and enter the course code with no space (e.g. COIT11133)
If you'd like to see the same page for a different period/term. Change the 2008 and T3 in the URL to match the term you'd like to view.
Setting the LMS: This information is typically entered in the course profile and then automatically brought across into another database. But the information can sometimes be wrong and needs correcting, currently an email to helpdesk@cqu.edu.au can get it changed.
Who's teaching what?
Responsibility: The faculty
Background: When the faculty decides who is teaching what they are required to enter that information into the Academic Staff Allocation (ASA) system. This is used to drive a range of systems, including Blackboard.
What am I teaching?: If you'd like to find out which courses you are allocated to then login to Staff MyCQU and view your teaching responsibilities for the appropriate period/year. If the courses don't appear here, then you have not been allocated to them in the ASA by the faculty.
Setting who's teaching what?: The people to contact within the faculty, as well as other information about this process, is available from this page. Information about who's teaching what at the AICs is automatically put into the ASA.
Creating the Blackboard course site
Responsibility: ITD and DTLS - actually a script written by ITD.
Background: The aim is for course sites to be created automatically as soon as the faculty and its staff have provided the above information. No need to wait on ITD or DTLS to do anything. Sites are created as soon as the above information is provided in the various databases. This can be months, even years, before the start of term.
Checking a course site: If you go to the Blackboard site you should aee a list of all the courses you are allocated to and which have been created.
Creating a course site: By default almost all courses will be automatically created by the ITD script. The course sites will be created as empty sites and will not be available to students.
Place content into the course site
Responsibility: Course developer or course coordinator
Background: The content, structure and tools on a course website is solely the responsibility of the course coordinator/developer. As they are the people with the knowledge of what they want the aim is to provide them with tools that allow them to put that knowledge into action. DTLS has a responsibility to provide documentation and training to help academic staff perform this task and to help solve any problems.
Methods: Some of the ways academics fulfill this role include:
- Copying content from a previous course site
Instructions and a screen cast available here - Editing and placing content onto the site.
The Staff Blackboard Manual provides some instructions on how to do this. - Adding in eStudyGuides
From T2, 2008 DTLS has a new process through which electronic versions of study guides are automatically made available on the web. Instructions on how to integrate these into your Blackboard site are available.
Make the course available
Responsibility: Course developer or course coordinator
Background: By default Blackboard course sites are unavailable. That is, students cannot see or access the course sites.
Making a course site available: There are two ways which a course site is made available
- Course coordinator/developer can make the site available using these instructions. This can be done whenever.
- Faculty management can decide that all course sites should be available by a certain date (e.g. the start of term). If so, DTLS staff may implement a process by which all Blackboard courses are made available.
