Navigating Blackboard

Making a New Blackboard Course Yourself

Here is a neat trick you can use if you want to make a new Blackboard course without having to go through CIT.

First go to the Control Panel of a course you are teaching, and click on "Course Copy".

Important! Next, choose "Exact Copy", even if you don't want the same users. The other choices will create courses with no users - not even yourself. The result is a course floating around in space, with no one to care for it.

Choose a suitable ID for your new course. This will be used to distinguish your newly made course from the course you copied it from.

Press the Submit button and you are done! You will have to wait a short while for the copying to take place.

Click on "All Blackboard Sites" to see your courses. Examine the Course ID to make sure that you make changes to the correct version of the course.

Getting Your New Course Ready

You will have to change some settings and data to get your Blackboard course the way you want it.

Removing Users from a Course

To remove users from a course, go to the Control Panel of the course, and select "Remove Users from Course".

Click the LIST ALL tab, then the List All button to list all the users that are enrolled in the course. This will be the best option if you are looking to remove most of the users to set up a new course. To the left of each person, there will be a checklist. Select all those that you want to remove, then type "Yes" (case sensitive) in the input box to verify that you really want to remove the selected users. Press Submit and you are done.

Modifying Users and Removing "Instructors"

If you are the actual instructor of a course and for some reason, there is another person listed as instructor, you will have problems removing him from your course. To get around this, click on "List / Modify Users".

Use your method of choice to view your users -- search is better for looking up a person, list all if there are multiple people you want to view. Clicking on the Properties button to the right of a person will bring up a screen similar to the screenshot below:

Change the instructor to a student by clicking on the radio button to the left of Student, and click submit. You can also edit the user's information on this screen if you need to in future. You can now follow the tutorial above on how to remove users if you are not sure how to.

Taking Useless Courses Off from Your Blackboard

Use this trick with extreme caution! This operation will make you lose control of the course and cannot be undone. That being said, it is very annoying if there you have countless courses cluttering your Blackboard that have no use anymore. Again, go to the Control Panel to modify users in "List / Modify Users". Proceed to modify yourself (click Properties next to your name).

Change the option under "Available" to "No", and press Submit. The course should no longer appear on your Blackboard site!