Don't Panic!

Contributed by Izaak Diefenbach, Instructional Designer I (COE)

Now that we are a couple of weeks into the new semester, everyone’s Blackboard courses are running smoothly, right? OK, maybe not, but hopefully, it is getting better. The first few weeks of any session are always busy, but the unique nature of this semester has presented us all with new challenges. When it comes to your online courses, I would like to give you one piece of advice: DON’T PANIC! You may discover a problem with your course, and it may seem bad, but don’t panic. The UHCL Instructional Design and Technology (IDT) team is here to help, and we will find a solution. I want to give a couple of examples of problems I’ve seen this semester that seemed very serious at the time but actually had simple solutions.

The first example is a course that used adaptive release settings to require students to complete a policy acknowledgment quiz before the course content would be made available. Students had to answer yes to two questions agreeing to abide by University policies before they could access any course content. The problem was that the instructor could see the quiz when they were logged into the course, but the students could not, so there was no way for the students to get access to the course contents. I looked into the issue and discovered that there was an adaptive release setting on the quiz itself that made it unavailable until the students made an attempt at taking the quiz. In other words, there was no way to take the quiz until they took the quiz. Luckily, it was an easy solution. Once the adaptive release setting on the quiz was deleted, everything worked fine.

The second example is a course that had been working fine then suddenly lost all of its contents. A few days into the semester, the professor started receiving reports from students that there was nothing in the course, just a blank shell. The professor logged into the course and found the same thing. The professor contacted me, and I investigated the issue. When I looked in Blackboard, I found two versions of the course. One version was empty, and one had the course contents. The instructor’s section number had changed, causing a new empty shell to be created and all of the student enrollments to be moved over to the new shell. Instructor and student access to the old course shell had been removed, so it appeared that the course contents had been deleted. As an administrator, I still had access to the old course shell and was able to copy the contents over to the new shell, fixing the problem.

These examples represent issues that seemed very serious at the time but actually had simple causes and solutions. I’ll say it again: DON’T PANIC! The IDT team is here for you! Not all problems will have solutions as simple as these, and I wish I could say we will always have an easy answer for every issue, but we will always work hard to find the best solution we can. If you have an issue with your course don’t hesitate to contact your designated Instructional Designer or the Support Center and we will look into it as soon as possible.