Set Up Courses

Make a Course Available to Students

A course must be made available before students enrolled in the course can view or access the course and its content. However, you may want to make a course unavailable during the building process or after a scheduled course has finished.

If your course is unavailable, access is determined by course role. Blackboard administrators, instructors, course builders, teaching assistants, and graders can see and access unavailable courses from the Courses menu and the course list, but they're marked as Private. Students can't access private courses regardless of the course duration.

See the Make a Course Available to Students help page or view the Make Course Available video for more information.

Set Up Notifications

On your activity stream's Notification Settings panel, you can choose which notifications you receive activity about in all your courses:

Activity stream: Choose which activities appear on your Stream page.
Email: If you want to receive email notifications, add an email address to your profile page. Then, choose how often and which activities you want to receive notifications for.
Push notifications: If you want to receive push notifications, choose how often and which activities you want to receive notifications for. Messages pop up on your mobile device if you have the Blackboard Instructor mobile app installed.

See the Notification Setting help page or view the Notification Settings video for more information.

Calendar

From the global calendar in the list where your name appears, you can see all your upcoming due dates and meetings across your courses—all in one place.

In your calendar, find this event information:

Office hours, course schedule, and events: These appointments appear automatically on the calendar when you add them to a course.
Due dates: When you create content with a due date, it appears automatically in the calendar.

Check your course calendar
When you access the calendar from inside a course, it shows events for that course only. Select the Calendar tab from the course's navigation bar.

The course view of the calendar displays due dates, the course schedule, office hours, and course-specific meetings and events. When you create content with a due date, it appears automatically in the calendar.

All events you create within a specific course roll up into the global calendar. You can switch over to the big picture by accessing your global calendar from the list where your name appears.

See the Calendar help article or view the Use the Calendar video for more information.

Student Preview

You want to be confident that your course is well-designed and functions as you expect—before your students see it. With student preview, you can review the course content from a student's perspective. You can also validate course behaviors. For example, you can review the conditional release of content and how grades appear.

While in student preview, you can do these student activities:

Submit assignments
Take tests
Download and upload files
Participate in conversations
Participate in discussions and journals
Send course messages
View grades as a student
Experience group membership

See the Student Preview help article or view the Student Preview video for more information.

Course Roles

Course roles control access to the content and tools within a course. Each user is assigned a role for each course they participate in. For example, a user with a role of Teaching Assistant in one course can have a role of Student in another course.

Instructor - provides access to all areas of the course including the control panel for posting content, making users available/unavailable, posting grades, and making the course available/unavailable. This role is generally assigned to the person developing, teaching, or facilitating the class and is automatically populated from Campus Connection.
Teaching Assistant provides access to everything included with the instructor role, except changing a users availability.
Course Builder - has access to most areas of the course. This role is appropriate for an assistant who shouldn't have access to student grades. If the course is unavailable to students, a course builder can still access the course.
Grader - The Grader role has limited access to the course. Graders can assist an instructor in the creation, management, delivery, and grading of assessments and surveys. The grader may also assist an instructor with adding manual entries. If a course is unavailable to students, the course appears in the course list for a user with the role of Grader.
Student - this is the default course user role. A user with the role of Student submits coursework and participates in discussions. Students can't create or grade course items. This role is automatically populated from Campus Connection.
Guest - provides access to areas in the course designated by the instructor, excluding the control panel, and is unable to view student interactions or post to blogs, wikis, or discussion boards. The guest role is not available in Ultra Course View.

Course Settings

Course Settings allows you to customize your course to suit your needs and those of your students. Course Settings appears at the top right corner of an Ultra course if the user has privileges to view or manage settings.

The settings that are included in the Course Settings option include:

Manage Course Duration - defines the time in which students may interact with a course. Students are always allowed to access some courses. Other courses have restrictions so students can only access them for a specific time. This is determined by Course Duration settings. The default setting for UND courses is Ongoing.

Manage Course Tools - You can manage various tools using Course Settings including Roster tool and Message tool.

The Roster option allows the instructor to determining if students can view the course roster. This feature is turned on by default.
The Messages option allows the instructor to determine if they would like the option for students to use the Messages option to communicate with other students in the course and with the instructor. When turned off, messages will only be sent via email.

Manage Virtual Classroom - instructors have the option to turn on access to Class Collaborate. By default, the option is turned off in all Ultra courses.

Course Banner

As an instructor, you and administrator users can upload an image to be the thumbnail in the Courses page at Base Navigation. It can be also the internal Course Banner inside your Ultra courses.

With course banners you:

Improve the way your Ultra Course View landing pages appear.
Improve student engagement and experience.
Bring consistency among what the Base Navigation displays and the actual course.
Help your students to differentiate between courses, and locate course details.
Make it easier for you to add a course schedule, and for your students to identify course faculty members and class meeting days, times, and location.

The Unsplash image library has been added to Blackboard Ultra. You can search their vast library of royalty-free images to use for your Course Banner as well as in Learning Modules.

See the Course Banner help article for more information.

Progress Tracking

You can enable this functionality to give your students an easy way to keep track of what they have done inside each one of the courses. When enabling progress tracking later than the beginning of the term, participatory items will be retroactively marked as complete. For example, assessments submitted previously by students will be marked as complete. Non-participatory items, like Ultra documents, will still need to be manually marked by students.

You can enable progress tracking at any time during the term.

See the Progress Tracking help article for more information.