Sidebar

Main Content

Blackboard Tips

Hide Your Old Courses

Blackboard course sites remain active for fourteen months, and over that time the "My Courses" area on your Penn Courseweb page can become crowded. How can you "fix" the page so that the only courses you see are your current courses? The solution is to hide the courses you don't want to see--this insures that you don't lose access to the site altogether. Here's how to do it:

Login to Blackboard and locate the "My Courses" box on the right-hand side of the Penn Courseweb page. In the box's title bar you'll see three icons, the middle of which looks like a pencil (see image)--click on it.

Under item 1. of the subsequent page you'll see a listing of your courses, and each of them will be checked under the "Show Course" and "Show Announcement" headings. To hide courses, deselect the checkboxes corresponding to them beneath "Show Course" and then click Submit at the bottom of the page.

When you return to the Penn Courseweb area, you'll find those course sites hidden.

Customize your Course Navigation Buttons

Quickly and easily improve your course site's usability by changing navigation button labels and removing buttons your site doesn't use.

Example 1: Change to

1. Enter Control Panel and click Manage Course Menu
2. Click Modify (far right of Course Information)
3. Enter "ENGL 101 Syllabus" (Note that there is an 18 character limit for button labels)
4. Click Submit and return to top level of course site. The button should now be changed.

Example 2: Remove

1. Follow step 1. above
2. Click Remove (far right of Course Information). Note warning prompt that appears. Deleted content cannot be recovered!
3. Click OK to remove button.

Manage content with Blackboard's Copy tools

Copying and moving course content has become significantly easier in Blackboard 6. Whether a single document, a folder or all of a course's content, you can swiftly transfer it to another course with the copy tools.

Scenario 1: Copying select files and folders from one course to another

This semester you are teaching the same course you taught last Spring. As that semester progressed, your Blackboard site grew and changed as you accumulated documents, multimedia and links. And although it would be simple to have all content duplicated into your new site, you don't want all of it, nor do you want to invest time in either deleting files or re-uploading files. How will you avoid expending the effort of managing all those files? Blackboard 6 has good news for you. The copy tool, accessible for both single items and folders of items, not only improves on the tedious content management capabilities of earlier versions of the software, but provides you more control over your content.

Use the following steps to copy a document from one Blackboard site to another:

1. Enter the Control Panel area of the course site that is the source of the content you want to copy, navigate to the area containing the content (e.g., Course Documents) and click the Copy button off to the right of the file listing.
2. In the screen that follows, use the pull-down menu to select the course site that is the target of the content you're copying.
3. Then, just below, click the Browse button, which will launch a smaller window containing an outline-style view of the target course. Select an area of the site as the target and, if necessary, click on the + to navigate to subfolders.
4. Click Submit to close the window.
5. If you want to delete the content after copying it, click beside Yes at the "Delete item after copy prompt"; otherwise, click Submit to finish copy process.

Note that this copy procedure is also available for folders.

Scenario 2: Copying areas of one course site into another

Suppose you're teaching two or more sections of the same course, yet, rather than combine three rosters into one site, you'd prefer that each section have its own site. Of course, once you decide to maintain several sites, you have to figure out a way to provide most, if not all, of the same content to each. Does that mean build a site and multiply the time required by the number of other sites? Not at all. Again Blackboard's improved content tools preserve you from what would otherwise be a hopelessly tedious chore. In this case, the solution is to build one site and "clone" it using Course Copy. Here's how:

1. After configuring one of your course sites to your liking, enter the Control Panel area and click Course Copy, which is in the Course Options box on the lower left.
2. Select "Copy Course Materials into an Existing Course"
3. Under step 1, click Browse. Search by course ID, or click Search to display all of your courses.
4. Locate the target course and click Select, located to the right.
5. Select each area of your site that you wish to copy into your target site and click Submit to execute copy process. Note: upon submission, you will see a message that the system will notify you via e-mail when copying is complete. The system, however, will likely not send an e-mail, so don't assume that the process has failed. In normal conditions in fact, the course copy takes only a few minutes. Check the target site after five minutes or so and you'll probably see everything.

Advanced Users: Create your own Display Option in the Gradebook

One of the especially handy features in Blackboard's gradebook is automatic translation of raw scores into letter grades, and it's a feature that works for manually-entered scores, as well as system-provided scores. But you might not always want to use Blackboard's predefined display options, Letter, Percentage, Score and Text. Moreover, if you want to use the display option of Text so that you can use P/F, S/U, you lose the automatic translation of scores.

Example: Add a display option of Pass/Fail to your gradebook

1. Enter Control Panel area and click Gradebook
2. From the toolbar along the top, click Gradebook Settings.
3. Click Manage Display Options
4. Type "Pass/Fail" into Name box under step 1.
5. Under step 2, provide values for system-graded items such as online tests (e.g. 0.0 % to 70 %), display value (e.g. Fail) and calculation value (e.g., 70 %). Complete the next row by providing the remaining range, 70.01 %, 100 %, Pass, 100 %.
6. Click Submit.

Pass/Fail will be now an option in the Display As pull-down menu when you create a new gradebook item. You can also modify existing gradebook items to use this display option. If you assign a raw score of 87 to a student in the gradebook, the item will appear to both you and the student as "Pass."