Start-of-Semester Common Faculty/Staff Questions and Answers

Contributed by Jenni Willis-Opalenik, Ph.D., Director - Technology Learning Services

As an FYI for next term, here are a few significant inquiries that our team receives and some responses and reminders.

Can you please merge my Blackboard courses together (after the semester has started)?

Although it is possible to merge courses together once the semester begins, doing so is inherently a destructive effort that will delete any work or communication your students in the classes have submitted thus far. In addition, if you have already put content in the shells that will be merged, we can only copy over content from one of the existing shells, but not both. We strongly recommend that instructors submit merge requests at least a week before classes are made available to students.

We just hired a new instructor. Can you please give them access to the Blackboard shell(s) for their classes?

Instructor and student enrollments in Blackboard shells are based on multiple automated processes that run between eServices/PeopleSoft, Blackboard, and other local applications. As a result, we cannot manually add either new instructors or newly added students to credit course Blackboard shells. We also have to manual mechanism by which to expedite this automation. The automated processes begin only AFTER the hiring college/program/department enters the new faulty member as a primary instructor of record. Once the new instructor is in the schedule, they will have access to their Blackboard shell(s) within 72 hours. This same timeline applies to student enrollments after their schedule change/add is entered into eServices/PeopleSoft.

My TA keeps losing access to my class(es). How can we fix this?

It is CRITICAL that students serving as TAs do not enroll in the course(s) for which they will serve as TAs. Doing so will make it impossible for the IDT team to manually add the student's PCLAB account as a TA in the course(s). The student will need to have and use a UHCL staff computer account as a TA, instead of their student/PCLAB credentials. The TA's staff computer account should be automatically created within 48 hours of when their employment record is created or updated in eServices/PeopleSoft.