Blackboard Learn delivers teaching and learning materials to students through a Blackboard course. Each course contains content that is specific to an enrolled cohort of students and is usually associated with a particular faculty or department.
There are three types of Blackboard course available:
- Blackboard Curriculum courses
- Blackboard Informational courses
- Blackboard Sandbox courses
These shall be explored in more detail below.
Any member of Imperial College can be enrolled on a course with a given role, or courses can be made available to all users via self-enrolment. Please see our help materials on enrolling users for more information.
Once created, it is the responsibility of the course admin (usually the course leader), or Faculty Ed-Tech, to create content and to ensure that staff and students are enrolled on the course correctly. If you need further guidance with this, please contact your Faculty Ed-Tech team.
Tabs
Blackboard Curriculum courses are created for an Imperial College accredited module and can contain any relevant content. They will usually contain some form of assessment, be part of the curriculum or be for credit. These courses can contain both formative and summative assessment content.
Curriculum courses are automatically created in Blackboard from the information held in Banner (the Imperial College student records system). They are created as a blank course shell that is unavailable to students.
Modules will need to be opted in for a corresponding course to be created in Blackboard.
Contact Registry if you need a curriculum module added to Blackboard.
Enrolments
For Blackboard Curriculum courses, students will be automatically enrolled, dependant on the information held in Banner.
The enrolling of members of staff to a course should be carried out by Faculty Ed-Tech teams. If you need further assistance with this, contact your Faculty Ed-Tech team or see our help materials on enrolling users.
Making your Blackboard Curriculum course available to students
Blackboard Curriculum courses are created as unavailable by default and it will need to be made available for students to participate in it. Unavailable courses are hidden from students, but enrolled staff will still be able to access the course as normal and edit content and enrolments. The availability of a Blackboard course can be altered to suit the teaching delivery needs.
To change the course availability, carry out the following:
- Navigate to the required course in Blackboard.
- Under the Course Management menu, select Customisation.
- Select Properties to change the course availability.
From here you can select the appropriate availability options:
- Available – the course is openly available to enrolled student participants. If self-enrolment is activated, then users will be able to enrol in the course anytime they wish.
- Not available – the course is not available to students. Please note that enrolled staff will always be able to access a course.
In addition, the duration of the course can be specified to start and end on set dates. Please see the Blackboard support materials on course start and end dates for more information.
Course Rollovers and Templates
Modules opted into the Blackboard-Banner integration have courses automatically created in the summer term before the start of each academic year. They are created as a blank course shell that is unavailable to students. Students will be automatically enrolled onto a Blackboard course within 24 hours of being added to the corresponding module in Banner.
Note: This is a key difference between Banner and the previous DSS integration, where students would have only been enrolled on a specific date.
If you need to rollover content into a newly created Blackboard Curriculum course, or use a template, contact your Faculty Ed-Tech team before the start of the academic year and they will be able to facilitate this for you.
Cross-listed courses – (parent-child)
Blackboard courses can be arranged in a parent/child relationship, with enrolments from the child course being replicated in the parent course. This can be used when a course has multiple iterations in Banner, as it removes the need for courses to be duplicated multiple times in Blackboard for different cohorts.
Each parent course can have multiple child courses attached and content added to the parent course will be visible to all students enrolled on the child courses too.