Blackboard Tips and Tricks
To Help You Use UIC’s Blackboard Server More Successfully and Efficiently
Site Management Several steps can be taken to make your site more effective and help your students get to important content as quickly as possible: Course Duration & Availability When your site is created, its duration is set according to your specifications on the site request form, by default until one week after finals for semester-based courses. If your students try to access the site afterwards, they will receive an error message (“outside of date range”). If you wish to let them continue using the site, be it to check grades or to communicate with each other, you can change the site’s duration in the `Control Panel`, under `Course Settings > Course Duration`. This is also useful if you asked us to create the site for a later date and then change your mind and want students to access it right away. While we do keep your sites intact for one semester after its completion, we need to make all semester-based sites unavailable during the semester break to avoid confusing students that see old sites listed among their current courses. If your students complain that they cannot see your site in their list of courses, check the setting in `Control Panel > Course Settings > Course Availability` and change it if necessary. Guest Access When we create a new course site, only its registered users can access it. However, you may wish to give prospective students an opportunity to preview your course description before enrolling. In `Control Panel > Course Settings > Guest Access`, you can turn on a “Preview” button for your course in the course catalogue that will enable anyone to visit certain open sections of your course. Besides, all users with an account on UIC’s Blackboard server will be able to visit those areas while logged in regularly. Note that the Announcements area is always open to such guest users, while all communication features are not! You can control which other sections are “secure”, i.e. only available to registered users, by going to `Control Panel > Course Settings > Area Availability`. Area Availability & Feature Control The navigation buttons that make up the left side of your Blackboard site are actually configurable. If you don’t use all of those features, you can and should remove some buttons to unclutter the interface and make navigation faster. You can even control what text some of the buttons display. In version 6, you will be able to specify your own text, while right now you can only select from pre-made choices. Go to `Control Panel > Course Settings > Area Availability` and disable all buttons that you won’t use anyway. Choose among the button titles at left, in the drop-down menus. Note that there are four individually configurable areas (Staff Info, Virtual Classroom, External Links, Tools) and four general content areas (Course Info, Course Docs, Assignments, Books). How you use the latter four is entirely up to you, but it is suggested to make the Course Information area available to guest users and post only information of use to prospective students there. On the other hand, if you are posting any third-party copyrighted materials on the site, you need to ensure that they are in a secure section, e.g. Course Documents. Below, the individual communication features and tools can be turned off. Say, if your students abuse the mass mailing feature, you could disable it here. Or you might want to allow live chat (virtual classroom) within the small project groups you set up, but disallow the class-wide chatroom, or prevent the students from viewing chat archives. Turning off Calendar and Tasks does not hurt, if you don’t use them for the class – students can always create individual tasks and calendar events from their My UIC page. Entry Point By default, users logging into your site will see the Announcements section. If that is not used on your site, and you want to take students to the content right away, you can specify a different start page in `Control Panel > Course Settings > Course Entry Point`. Document Management We would be happy to show you any of these things in detail in the ITL. We will train you on instructional software and help you work more efficiently with it. We also provide facilities for document creation & conversion, or to try out a program. Creating Documents Suitable for Upload The purpose of putting documents on the web is to make them easily available. Thus it is paramount to avoid proprietary formats that not everyone can open, that may not open in the browser itself, or that may even be totally inaccessible to users with disabilities. Recommendation: use HTML format wherever possible, and PDF for documents involving complex layouts, or intended for printing. To create HTML pages, the best program is Macromedia DreamWeaver, a visual page editor that packs a lot of power, yet is easy to learn. Another option is your favorite word processor, but typically the pages created by those should be refined a bit before uploading. In particular Office 2000 programs create a lot of “junk” code that makes files up to three times as large as necessary. DreamWeaver can clean that up in one step. To make PDF documents, you just need to get the full Acrobat program ($50 at Urbana Central Stores) and print to PDF from any application. In MS Office, you get with Acrobat an even better method: PDFmaker, a macro that creates accessible PDFs with hyperlinks and table of contents automatically. This is also an ideal method for publishing slide shows. A Warning about Pasting HTML While it is possible to paste HTML code into various form fields on Blackboard, it is extremely important to understand that this feature only supports HTML snippets, not entire HTML documents. Otherwise page display can get corrupted so much that it becomes impossible for you to remove the offending document. By snippet I mean a piece of valid HTML code, with all tags properly closed/paired, that was part of a webpage’s body section. In particular, stylesheets and scripts from a page’s head section are not allowed, nor are the `<head>` and `<body>` tags themselves. Folders vs. Learning Units `Folders` help immensely in organizing a long list of materials into subsections, but faculty kept wanting more – a way to present materials to students in a certain order, with reading materials followed by an assignment, a quiz, or even a link to the discussion forum. Most of these are possible now (except the forum link), but sometimes you want to enforce the sequence in which these materials are visited. This is the primary purpose of a `Learning Unit`. The other nice feature they offer is display mode. You can set a Learning Unit to open in its own new window, without the Blackboard navigation bar at the left. This allows you to display wide pages, like those generated by Powerpoint when saving a slide presentation in web format. Controlling Document Availability A recently added feature for all content areas is timed content release. You can specify when your item will first be displayed, and up to which date/time it will remain available. This can be used to lay out your course in advance and have the sections appear to the students over time, or it can enforce a duedate on a quiz. Note that after copying a site for a new term, you will have to update all those settings, or the content won’t show up. Hyperlinking your Documents within Blackboard The web is all about links between documents, but Blackboard is a very rigid hierarchical content organization system. So how can you provide links to other sections of your course? The best method is to create your materials as a set of linked webpages in the first place, which you can then import as a whole into Blackboard. You can either place them on a regular webserver and just link to them (no access control in that case), or create a ZIP archive of the entire site, then upload into Blackboard and choose `Unpackage this file` as special action. Make sure to use only relative links for documents within that site. But sometimes you want to link to an existing section of your course, say a discussion forum. Warning: this type of link will break when the course is copied, and can even cause errors during the export- or copy-procedure that force us to remove the link. That said, here’s how you do it: Navigate to the document or item you want to link to. Don’t open it yet, just display the link to it. Right-click on the link and choose `Copy Shortcut` or `Copy Link Location`, depending on your browser. In the Control Panel, add or modify an item that should link to your target. Use the form field to type in any surrounding text, then the link itself in this format: `<a href=”paste your link here` `”>`type text to click on here`</a>` Test the link in the student view. You can see this in action as part of our Blackboard Tips and Tricks webcast, part of the itlTV series of Wednesday brownbag lunch seminar webcasts. User Management This is where we get the most support questions. So let’s clarify a few issues: Adding & Removing Users To enroll a user, first always check that he’s not in your site already: in the `Control Panel`, use `List/Modify Users`and click the `Search` button to see everyone listed, or enter a last name or NetID (=username), click the appropriate radio button, then `Search`. If the user really needs to be added, always assume that he is on the system already, and use `Add User > Enroll Existing User`. Search for the user, then click the checkbox in front of his name and `OK` to add him as student. If he needs to have more privileges, use `List/Modify Users` and click `Properties`, where you can change your users’ access privileges and password. Only if both of these searches yielded the message “None found” should you create a new account for this person. Please use the UIC NetID as login name and see our Policies page for the procedure to follow with non-UIC users. We will batch upload your users just before classes start, and we add late registrants, but we don’t do drop-processing. You can safely remove any dropped students yourself via `Remove User`, which will discard all their data associated with your course without affecting their other Blackboard sites. Handling Access Problems There are plenty of reasons why someone might not be able to log in to your Blackboard site: The course is unavailable or outside of its date range. See above. The user is not enrolled (see previous question). The user forgot their password or misunderstood what password to use. You should test logging in as them, using the last 8 digits of their SSN as password (our standard). If that doesn’t work, reset their password from `List/Modify Users > Properties`. The user needs to clear their browser cache, then restart the browser. They should also make sure the cache settings are to compare pages with the server Every Time. This applies particularly if they can log in on some computer, but not on others. The user has auto-form-completion turned on in Internet Explorer and has saved the password. This does not work with Blackboard. Under `Tools > Internet Options > Content > AutoComplete`, the box for “User names and passwords on forms” must be unchecked, and all currently saved passwords should be cleared via the respective button. Using the DiscussionBoard A few tips for getting more out of your forums. The session on “Engaging your Students” offers more info on successful forum use and encouraging participation. Displaying Entire Threads The normal view of one message at a time is often not sufficient or desirable, but few users know that Blackboard also lets you view a complete thread, a free selection of messages, or even an entire forum at a time. For each forum you enter, Blackboard remembers whether you are showing the Options panel. So remember to click on `Show Options` each time you enter a new forum (the little grey tab at top right). That makes a few buttons available, among them the `Collect` button. Select a few messages by clicking off their checkboxes at left, or use `Select All`. Then use `Collect` to get all those messages on one page, ready for printing. Note that the messages will always be in their threading order, no matter what sort order you had in the main forum view. And there is no thread indication, so you cannot see which exact message is being responded to. Saving a Forum Forum contributions are not kept when a site is recycled for a new term, but sometimes you may want to keep them, e.g. to demonstrate to new students how a forum might work. It may even be desirable to edit out the names for anonymity. To save an entire forum out as HTML page, use the mechanism described above, then use Netscape’s `File > Save Frame As` feature. In MS Internet Explorer, there is no way to save a frame, so you need to first open the forum in its own separate window: go to the Discussion Board top level, right-click the name of the forum in question, and choose `Open in New Window`. You can then `Save` or `Print` from the `File` menu as usual. Edit the resulting webpage in DreamWeaver or a similar tool, or even in your favorite word processor. Or print to PDF and use Acrobat’s commenting features to highlight some sections. Forum Usage Suggestions It is a good idea to set aside a forum for technical issues, so they don’t clutter your class discussions, and students have an easy-to-find place to get help. You may also want to include a forum for gripes, comments, or other concerns, where anonymous postings should be allowed. A lounge forum to socialize helps students loosen up and become comfortable with the medium, plus it can increase the frequency of site visits. Audience Questions There are certainly plenty of other useful topics that we could not cover in this workshop. Remember that the ITL support staff at blackboard@uic.edu is there for you, whenever you have a question concerning Blackboard CourseInfo. And we hope you will find our support site at http://www.accc.uic.edu/itl/blackboard/ useful and visit it frequently. Help us build the FAQ and HowTo-Guides We work hard at keeping the FAQ up-to-date and include there all items of general relevance that recur in our interactions with our faculty and TAs. When a long or complex procedure needs to be explained or demonstrated, we try to build a little HowTo document for it. Please help us make these better by: Contributing questions that you think should be covered Letting us know when a document was useful Making suggestions for improvements where something is unclear ©2002 Volker Kleinschmidt, UIC Instructional Technology Lab

Blackboard Tips and Tricks

To Help You Use UIC’s Blackboard Server More Successfully and Efficiently

Site Management

Several steps can be taken to make your site more effective and help your students get to important content as quickly as possible:

Course Duration & Availability

When your site is created, its duration is set according to your specifications on the site request form, by default until one week after finals for semester-based courses. If your students try to access the site afterwards, they will receive an error message (“outside of date range”). If you wish to let them continue using the site, be it to check grades or to communicate with each other, you can change the site’s duration in the Control Panel, under Course Settings > Course Duration. This is also useful if you asked us to create the site for a later date and then change your mind and want students to access it right away.

While we do keep your sites intact for one semester after its completion, we need to make all semester-based sites unavailable during the semester break to avoid confusing students that see old sites listed among their current courses. If your students complain that they cannot see your site in their list of courses, check the setting in Control Panel > Course Settings > Course Availability and change it if necessary.

Guest Access

When we create a new course site, only its registered users can access it. However, you may wish to give prospective students an opportunity to preview your course description before enrolling. In Control Panel > Course Settings > Guest Access, you can turn on a “Preview” button for your course in the course catalogue that will enable anyone to visit certain open sections of your course. Besides, all users with an account on UIC’s Blackboard server will be able to visit those areas while logged in regularly. Note that the Announcements area is always open to such guest users, while all communication features are not! You can control which other sections are “secure”, i.e. only available to registered users, by going to Control Panel > Course Settings > Area Availability.

Area Availability & Feature Control

The navigation buttons that make up the left side of your Blackboard site are actually configurable. If you don’t use all of those features, you can and should remove some buttons to unclutter the interface and make navigation faster. You can even control what text some of the buttons display. In version 6, you will be able to specify your own text, while right now you can only select from pre-made choices. Go to Control Panel > Course Settings > Area Availability and disable all buttons that you won’t use anyway. Choose among the button titles at left, in the drop-down menus. Note that there are four individually configurable areas (Staff Info, Virtual Classroom, External Links, Tools) and four general content areas (Course Info, Course Docs, Assignments, Books). How you use the latter four is entirely up to you, but it is suggested to make the Course Information area available to guest users and post only information of use to prospective students there. On the other hand, if you are posting any third-party copyrighted materials on the site, you need to ensure that they are in a secure section, e.g. Course Documents.

Below, the individual communication features and tools can be turned off. Say, if your students abuse the mass mailing feature, you could disable it here. Or you might want to allow live chat (virtual classroom) within the small project groups you set up, but disallow the class-wide chatroom, or prevent the students from viewing chat archives. Turning off Calendar and Tasks does not hurt, if you don’t use them for the class – students can always create individual tasks and calendar events from their My UIC page.

Entry Point

By default, users logging into your site will see the Announcements section. If that is not used on your site, and you want to take students to the content right away, you can specify a different start page in Control Panel > Course Settings > Course Entry Point.

Document Management

We would be happy to show you any of these things in detail in the ITL. We will train you on instructional software and help you work more efficiently with it. We also provide facilities for document creation & conversion, or to try out a program.

Creating Documents Suitable for Upload

The purpose of putting documents on the web is to make them easily available. Thus it is paramount to avoid proprietary formats that not everyone can open, that may not open in the browser itself, or that may even be totally inaccessible to users with disabilities. Recommendation: use HTML format wherever possible, and PDF for documents involving complex layouts, or intended for printing.

To create HTML pages, the best program is Macromedia DreamWeaver, a visual page editor that packs a lot of power, yet is easy to learn. Another option is your favorite word processor, but typically the pages created by those should be refined a bit before uploading. In particular Office 2000 programs create a lot of “junk” code that makes files up to three times as large as necessary. DreamWeaver can clean that up in one step.

To make PDF documents, you just need to get the full Acrobat program ($50 at Urbana Central Stores) and print to PDF from any application. In MS Office, you get with Acrobat an even better method: PDFmaker, a macro that creates accessible PDFs with hyperlinks and table of contents automatically. This is also an ideal method for publishing slide shows.

A Warning about Pasting HTML

While it is possible to paste HTML code into various form fields on Blackboard, it is extremely important to understand that this feature only supports HTML snippets, not entire HTML documents. Otherwise page display can get corrupted so much that it becomes impossible for you to remove the offending document. By snippet I mean a piece of valid HTML code, with all tags properly closed/paired, that was part of a webpage’s body section. In particular, stylesheets and scripts from a page’s head section are not allowed, nor are the <head> and <body> tags themselves.

Folders vs. Learning Units

Folders help immensely in organizing a long list of materials into subsections, but faculty kept wanting more – a way to present materials to students in a certain order, with reading materials followed by an assignment, a quiz, or even a link to the discussion forum. Most of these are possible now (except the forum link), but sometimes you want to enforce the sequence in which these materials are visited. This is the primary purpose of a Learning Unit.

The other nice feature they offer is display mode. You can set a Learning Unit to open in its own new window, without the Blackboard navigation bar at the left. This allows you to display wide pages, like those generated by Powerpoint when saving a slide presentation in web format.

Controlling Document Availability

A recently added feature for all content areas is timed content release. You can specify when your item will first be displayed, and up to which date/time it will remain available. This can be used to lay out your course in advance and have the sections appear to the students over time, or it can enforce a duedate on a quiz. Note that after copying a site for a new term, you will have to update all those settings, or the content won’t show up.

Hyperlinking your Documents within Blackboard

The web is all about links between documents, but Blackboard is a very rigid hierarchical content organization system. So how can you provide links to other sections of your course?

The best method is to create your materials as a set of linked webpages in the first place, which you can then import as a whole into Blackboard. You can either place them on a regular webserver and just link to them (no access control in that case), or create a ZIP archive of the entire site, then upload into Blackboard and choose Unpackage this file as special action. Make sure to use only relative links for documents within that site.

But sometimes you want to link to an existing section of your course, say a discussion forum. Warning: this type of link will break when the course is copied, and can even cause errors during the export- or copy-procedure that force us to remove the link. That said, here’s how you do it:

Navigate to the document or item you want to link to. Don’t open it yet, just display the link to it. Right-click on the link and choose Copy Shortcut or Copy Link Location, depending on your browser.
In the Control Panel, add or modify an item that should link to your target. Use the form field to type in any surrounding text, then the link itself in this format: <a href=”paste your link here ”>type text to click on here</a>
Test the link in the student view.

You can see this in action as part of our Blackboard Tips and Tricks webcast, part of the itlTV series of Wednesday brownbag lunch seminar webcasts.

User Management

This is where we get the most support questions. So let’s clarify a few issues:

Adding & Removing Users

To enroll a user, first always check that he’s not in your site already: in the Control Panel, use List/Modify Usersand click the Search button to see everyone listed, or enter a last name or NetID (=username), click the appropriate radio button, then Search.

If the user really needs to be added, always assume that he is on the system already, and use Add User > Enroll Existing User. Search for the user, then click the checkbox in front of his name and OK to add him as student. If he needs to have more privileges, use List/Modify Users and click Properties, where you can change your users’ access privileges and password.

Only if both of these searches yielded the message “None found” should you create a new account for this person. Please use the UIC NetID as login name and see our Policies page for the procedure to follow with non-UIC users.

We will batch upload your users just before classes start, and we add late registrants, but we don’t do drop-processing. You can safely remove any dropped students yourself via Remove User, which will discard all their data associated with your course without affecting their other Blackboard sites.

Handling Access Problems

There are plenty of reasons why someone might not be able to log in to your Blackboard site:

The course is unavailable or outside of its date range. See above.
The user is not enrolled (see previous question).
The user forgot their password or misunderstood what password to use. You should test logging in as them, using the last 8 digits of their SSN as password (our standard). If that doesn’t work, reset their password from List/Modify Users > Properties.
The user needs to clear their browser cache, then restart the browser. They should also make sure the cache settings are to compare pages with the server Every Time. This applies particularly if they can log in on some computer, but not on others.
The user has auto-form-completion turned on in Internet Explorer and has saved the password. This does not work with Blackboard. Under Tools > Internet Options > Content > AutoComplete, the box for “User names and passwords on forms” must be unchecked, and all currently saved passwords should be cleared via the respective button.

Using the DiscussionBoard

A few tips for getting more out of your forums. The session on “Engaging your Students” offers more info on successful forum use and encouraging participation.

Displaying Entire Threads

The normal view of one message at a time is often not sufficient or desirable, but few users know that Blackboard also lets you view a complete thread, a free selection of messages, or even an entire forum at a time. For each forum you enter, Blackboard remembers whether you are showing the Options panel. So remember to click on Show Options each time you enter a new forum (the little grey tab at top right). That makes a few buttons available, among them the Collect button. Select a few messages by clicking off their checkboxes at left, or use Select All. Then use Collect to get all those messages on one page, ready for printing. Note that the messages will always be in their threading order, no matter what sort order you had in the main forum view. And there is no thread indication, so you cannot see which exact message is being responded to.

Saving a Forum

Forum contributions are not kept when a site is recycled for a new term, but sometimes you may want to keep them, e.g. to demonstrate to new students how a forum might work. It may even be desirable to edit out the names for anonymity. To save an entire forum out as HTML page, use the mechanism described above, then use Netscape’s File > Save Frame As feature. In MS Internet Explorer, there is no way to save a frame, so you need to first open the forum in its own separate window: go to the Discussion Board top level, right-click the name of the forum in question, and choose Open in New Window. You can then Save or Print from the File menu as usual. Edit the resulting webpage in DreamWeaver or a similar tool, or even in your favorite word processor. Or print to PDF and use Acrobat’s commenting features to highlight some sections.

Forum Usage Suggestions

It is a good idea to set aside a forum for technical issues, so they don’t clutter your class discussions, and students have an easy-to-find place to get help. You may also want to include a forum for gripes, comments, or other concerns, where anonymous postings should be allowed. A lounge forum to socialize helps students loosen up and become comfortable with the medium, plus it can increase the frequency of site visits.

Audience Questions

There are certainly plenty of other useful topics that we could not cover in this workshop. Remember that the ITL support staff at blackboard@uic.edu is there for you, whenever you have a question concerning Blackboard CourseInfo. And we hope you will find our support site at http://www.accc.uic.edu/itl/blackboard/ useful and visit it frequently.

Help us build the FAQ and HowTo-Guides

We work hard at keeping the FAQ up-to-date and include there all items of general relevance that recur in our interactions with our faculty and TAs. When a long or complex procedure needs to be explained or demonstrated, we try to build a little HowTo document for it. Please help us make these better by:

Contributing questions that you think should be covered
Letting us know when a document was useful
Making suggestions for improvements where something is unclear