Beginning of Semester

Course Availability

Blackboard sites will go live one week before the semester start date to allow students access to the course syllabus and important course announcements. Please have your course syllabus, contact information, and an announcement regarding the course schedule posted by this date. If you are still working in the Blackboard course and wish to hide areas of the course from students, use these steps to reorder and manage course menu items.

If you would like to make your course available to students earlier than one week prior to the semester start date, visit the Make a Course Available to Students Blackboard Help page.

Copy and Move Course Content

Copying course materials into an existing course will add content to a course, but it won't remove existing content. You can only copy materials into a course if you have the role of instructor, teaching assistant (TA), or course builder in that course. To view instructions for copying course content and to learn about the behavior of copied content, please see the "How can I copy something in my Blackboard course to another area, or to a different course?" help article.

Course Merge

Some instructors prefer to combine multiple course sites into a single merged Blackboard course. This allows them to post materials only once for all enrolled students to see, rather than posting to each separate course site.

The Course Merge copies the student enrollments from one or more "child" courses into a "parent" course. Course merge can be used to:

Merge enrollments of two or more sections of the same course that have the same department and catalog number.
Merge cross-listed courses that have different departments and catalog numbers.

In a merged course, students will see the name of the original course and the content from the parent course. The Course Merge Tool does not copy any content from the child courses to the parent course. If you want to copy content from any of the child courses to the parent course you should make note of this when requesting the merge. After merging, the child course(s) will be unavailable and new content can be added to the parent course only.

Reasons Not to Merge Blackboard Courses:

Course Merge will combine the Grade Center listing for all the students. If you require separate Grade Centers do not use Course Merge. This may apply if you teach both undergraduate and graduate sections of a course and they are graded differently.
If you have entered grades or collected student work in a Blackboard course, you will not be able to access the grades or submitted work after merging as a child course. Once courses are merged, we are unable to reverse this so we recommend merging Blackboard courses before any grades are recorded.

A request to combine multiple course sections into one Blackboard site may be submitted using the Blackboard Request form.

Can't See My Course

Course shells are automatically created in Blackboard for all classes that exists in Campus Connection approximately 110 days prior to the start date of the course listed in Campus Connection. Sometimes a Blackboard course is created before an instructor has been assigned to teach the class or the instructor of record changes before the start of the semester. Updates to Campus Connection flow to Blackboard within 24 hours of the change. If you don’t see your course in Blackboard here are some steps you can take to investigate:

If you do not see the class you are teaching in Campus Connection we recommend contacting your department office. They can start the process to update Campus Connection. Once Campus Connection has been changed, Blackboard will automatically be updated within 24 hours.
If you see the class in Campus Connection but do not see it in Blackboard, you can check your course list settings to see if it was hidden from view. Put your cursor on the My Courses header bar and click the gear icon on the right. Locate the row for the course that you would like to reveal and click the check box under Select All. This should restore the view of a previously hidden course. Click Submit to save any changes.

If you need assistance finding a course site in Blackboard please contact the UND Tech Support at 701-777-2222.

Find your Courses

Links to access your past, current and future courses are located in the Courses menu, with the ability to filter/sort for a cleaner look and feel. There is a similar option to access organization sites.

For more information, view Blackboard's Find Your Courses help article.

Add a Teaching Assistant

If you have a teaching assistant that needs access to your Blackboard site, you can use the Blackboard request form to submit the request to have them added.

If you are requesting an undergraduate teaching assistant (UTA), please make sure to select this specific option the request from. Approval from the department chair is required to complete these requests.
There are two roles available for UTA's. College/departments must decide, based upon their requirements, which type of role is being used.
- UTA-Grader role provides access to all of the same tools the instructor and teaching assistant have in the course. This includes posting content, grading, participating in discussions, blogs, wikis and all student interactions.
- UTA-Builder role provides access to all tools the course builder has in the course. This includes posting content and sending announcements. This role does NOT provide access to grading or any student interactions.

Date Management

You can use the date management feature to update content dates when you copy a course from a previous term or calendar year. Date types include due dates, availability, and adaptive release dates related to the course content. On the Date Management page, you can choose to adjust dates automatically or individually from one convenient location.

For information on managing dates in your course, please see the Blackboard Date Management article or view the Automatically Adjust Dates in a Copied Course video.

Clean up My Blackboard Courses

As courses get copied from semester to semester they can sometimes get cluttered with unwanted materials, duplicate items, and more. Decluttering your Blackboard site will reduce course size, improve accessibility scores, avoid potential Grade Center issues, prepare for future copying and more.

Some ways to declutter your Blackboard Courses are:

Adopting a Textbook

Follett Discover is a powerful online tool that transforms the course materials discovery and adoption process for faculty and helps students obtain, organize and instantly access their required and recommended course materials from within Blackboard.

Many departments have a Follett Discover Concierge to assist faculty in adding textbooks and course materials into Follett Discover. Faculty should check with their department first to see if this assistance is available.

For more information about adopting your textbook with Follett Discover, please see the Follett Discover webpage.