It's not too early to begin preparing your SU22/FA22 Blackboard shells. For this week, I thought I would look at a few articles from past newsletters that may be useful as you get your course ready for the new semester.
Copying content from a master course or a previous semester’s course shell is one of the first things an instructor does to prepare for a new semester. There are a few mistakes we see regularly that can make this process more confusing or frustrating than it needs to be. In an earlier newsletter, I presented the article Blackboard Tip: Using the Course Copy Tool, in which I took a look at the Course Copy tool and discussed some simple tips for completing the process as smoothly as possible.
There is another tool in Blackboard that many instructors don’t even know about that can be a big help when preparing for a new semester. The Date Management tool allows instructors to update all of the date information in their courses, including due dates, adaptive release dates, and test dates. In another previous newsletter article, Blackboard Tip: Date Management Tool, I discussed the Date Management tool and how to use it to update the dates in your course each semester.
The entry point of a Blackboard course is the first page the user sees first when they open the course. When an instructor is preparing a course, they may decide they want it to open to a different page than it has in the past, particularly if they are borrowing course contents from another instructor. I wrote another newsletter article, Blackboard Tip: Changing the Entry Point of Your Course, discussing this feature, and provided instructions for resetting the entry point to your course.
Finally, in the blog post Don't Panic!, I discuss the most important tip I know: Don’t Panic! Remember, your IDT Team and the Support Center are here to help you get your courses ready and will do what it takes to make that process go as smoothly as possible. Please do not hesitate to contact us if there is anything we can do to help you.
