This is a reminder that the University of Richmond maintains a building block to allow professors to see photographs of their students within Blackboard. To access this feature, the instructor must be in an academic course within Blackboard (this is a course with a CRN from the Registrar). In the control panel click on “Course Tools” and then “Student Photographs”. For support with Blackboard contact blackboard@richmond.edu or 287-6860. [This feature only applies to instructors not students].
Category: Tips Page 4 of 5
It’s been a great semester! Your students were at the top of their game, and you were at the top of yours. Now for the winter break.
Now is the perfect time to consider the role of technology in your courses. The first question you might consider is how are you using technology currently? Do you use Blackboard, email, netfiles or PowerPoint? If so, how are you using those technologies?
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Blackboard is a great space to consolidate class handouts, syllabi and other files that need to be distributed to your students. BUT did you know it can do so much more? Blackboard allows the instructor to create assignments that students upload directly into Blackboard Grade Center, where the instructor can download all the files at one time. You also can use multiple choice, true/false, and multiple answer quizzes and test as an assessment of student knowledge which can be graded by the system. The instant feedback provided to the student increases student knowledge and provides a foundation for future learning.
There is another feature in Blackboard that as faculty, you will want to know about. The feature displays student photographs for the students in your course. This is a great way to associate a face with a name and can really speed up the first day of class.
Blackboard also has features that you might want to explore for the fall such as discussion board, groups, wikis, and blogs. These technologies allow you to introduce outside classroom discussion to the course, collaboration and reflection to generate higher order cognitive skills. If you would like to know about these technologies within Blackboard, please contact your liaison.
As you prepare for the spring semester, contact your liaison to discuss how technology can support your class objectives. The Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology is here to help you consider the best technological tool to support your pedagogical needs.
A few tips: consider archiving your course as soon as possible. If you are not sure how, read click here.
This is a great time to download your Grade Center so that you can have an easy-to-get-to record of student work in your course. Remember, all students are removed from your course 60 days from the end of the semester. Also, if you are using the discussion board, consider making an archive of those responses as well.
We hope you had a wonderful semester and we look forward to working with you in the spring!
As we start up a new academic year, it might be helpful to revisit a best practice for setting up your course. After you request your course, you might want to copy a previous course into the new course. When a course is copied, the navigation buttons (those on the left side of the screen) are placed at the bottom of those created from the course template. You may not want the buttons created by the course template and want to delete these. STOP! First, you will need to change the course entry point for the course. This is located in the Course Management area under the Control Panel and then Customization.
Groups are one of the most underutilized features in Blackboard, IMHO, but also one of the most useful.
With Groups in Blackboard 9.1, you can:
- Release quizzes and assignments to different groups at different times
- Batch-add people to groups
- Set SmartViews in the Grade Center to view the grades of particular sets of students
Groups basics
If you’ve requested a merged course or just want to give students a space where they can work as a team by exchanging files, keeping a team blog,using group chat room, etc., Groups will be helpful to you. You can enable some or all of these for each group. Blackboard has a helpful viewlet about how to add students to groups.
Setting up sets of Groups
Group sets can be useful if you want to divide your students multiple ways (i.e. sections AND teams; teams WITHIN sections), The Academic Colleges Group IT (ACGICT) has created two video tutorials that will show you how to create group sets and how to edit group sets. You can also randomize user enrollments into groups in sets.
Self-enrolling in Groups
Need a sign-up sheet? You can use the self-enroll option in Groups to set up groups to which students add themselves. Group sets also include a self-enroll option.
Tests: Adaptive Release for Groups
When setting up a test that will be deployed, you can create Rules in Advanced Adaptive Release, which you find by clicking the double-chevron to the right of the test once you’ve added it to a content area. Select Create Criteria > Membership to select the Group; select Create Criteria > Date to set the to/from dates).
ACGICT also has created a viewlet on using Adaptive Release to restrict content to groups.
Please contact your technology liaison, or e-mail blackboard AT richmond DOT edu for further assistance with or ideas about using groups!
Are you interested in embedding electronic reserves into your Blackboard course? If so, the UR Library provides instructions and procedures on their Library Course Reserves web page.
In addition, you can access pertinent UR Copyright Guidelines and a detailed guide to Linking to online resources within Blackboard on the Library web site as well. If you have questions, please contact your Library liaison, and they would be happy to assist.