Author Archives: Russell Davidson

Enroll one or more users

Although the link between Knowledge and TitanConnect means students are automatically loaded into your traditional courses based on their enrollment, you may on occasion need to add a student, teaching assistant, or co-instructor to your Blackboard course site. Fortunately, this is easily done.

 

Users and Groups

1. First, click the USERS AND GROUPS heading in the Control Panel, then select Users.

FInd Users to Enroll2. The Users page lists all the users enrolled in the course (provided the pulldown in the search space is set to its default — not blank). To add a user, click the FIND USERS TO ENROLL button in the upper left.

browse3. If you know the usernames of the folks you need to enroll, you may enter them in the Username space. Separate the names with a comma (remember, usernames are the first part of the users UDM email address, the part before the @). Note: If you get one wrong, none of the usernames in your string will submit. If you’re not certain, click the BROWSE button instead to search for their accounts.

search box4. Last name is usually the best way to search for an account. Select Last Name from the first select list (defaults to Username), make sure the second list is set to Contains, and enter all or part of the person’s last name in the search space. Then click GO to do your search. You may be tempted to click SUBMIT at the bottom of the page, but that’s for the next step.

 

check5. Check the line for the person you want to add to the course, then click SUBMIT. If the person you’re looking for doesn’t appear, it means one of three things:

They are already enrolled in the course

Re-check the enrollments list in the course by going back to that USERS page. You can even search that list just like you searched all the users in Knowledge back in step 4.

They were enrolled in the course, then dropped

When a student (or faculty person) is dropped from a course, their account and any information they added (or added about them, such as grades) are not actually deleted from the course, they just removed from view (so that if a student adds back in later their grades and work will be restored). Unfortunately, only an Instructional Design Studio staff member can check whether this is the case and resolve the situation. If you cannot find the user and have confirmed they are not already enrolled in the course, contact IDS (ids@udmercy.edu ; 313-578-0580) for assistance.

They do not have an account on Knowledge

Only active students, adjuncts, faculty, and UDM staff and administrators have Knowledge accounts. If a student has not enrolled in a course yet, or if a student was not enrolled in the immediately preceding term, they will not have an account. Our Blackboard license requires us to limit enrollment in the course site to current students and current employees. If an employee (faculty, staff, or administrator) does not have an account, contact IDS (ids@udmercy.edu ; 313-578-0580) for assistance.

submit6. If you’re only adding the one user, verify that the Role is appropriate to the user you’re adding, then click Submit. If you need to add more folks, click Browse again and complete steps 4 and 5 again.

Need to know the differences between the roles?

If you’re adding a co-instructor, select INSTRUCTOR from the ROLE pulldown list. NOTE: You will not be able to remove any user added as an instructor. It’s also worth mentioning that when students send email to ALL INSTRUCTORS, those messages will go to anyone added as an instructor (as the label would suggest). If you need to add a program coordinator (department chair, etc), and they’d rather not receive all the emails intended for instructors, you can add them as a TEACHING ASSISTANT instead. TAs have all the same rights in a Blackboard course as an Instructor, they just don’t get the ALL INSTRUCTOR emails.

COURSE BUILDER users have the ability to add, remove, and edit course content but do not have access to GRADE CENTER information. GRADER users are the opposite of COURSE BUILDER users — they have access to the Grade Center, but cannot add, remove, or edit content.

GUEST users only have access to content items. They cannot participate in discussions, submit assignments, take tests, etc.

 

Foldering multiple presentations in Blackboard Collaborate

If you’ve ever run a class in Blackboard Collaborate and tried using more than one PowerPoint presentation — maybe your students are giving online presentations and each presenter has their own set of slides — you’ve noticed Collaborate doesn’t manage multiple presentation files very well on its own. Fortunately, we can easily solve this problem by manually foldering our presentations. In Blackboard Collaborate lingo, we need to create “Whiteboard page groups.”

First, we need to open the Page Explorer. The easiest way to open the Page Explorer is by clicking the menu button on the Whiteboard navigator (in the upper right of your whiteboard screen), and selecting SHOW PAGE EXPLORER.

show page explorer

Now we need to create a new Whiteboard Page Group. RIGHT CLICK on MAIN ROOM in the Page Explorer, point to NEW, then select Whiteboard Page Group.

new-whiteboard-group

Next, name your group and click OK.

name-group

This adds our named group to the Page Explorer. To add a set of slides to this group, right click on your new group and select OPEN.

open

Then locate and open the PowerPoint file on your computer. Depending on the size of your presentation, it may take a few minutes for the PowerPoint file to upload into your Whiteboard Group. Once the upload is complete, you should see previews of all the slides in your Page Explorer.

explorer-w-slides

Double-click a slide to push it out to the whiteboard. You move a slide up or down in the list by clicking and dragging it. You can remove a slide by right-clicking the slide, then pointing to SELECTED and choosing DELETE. You can also collapse or expand a set of slides by clicking the group name.

Setting Up a Back-Up Collaborate Room

Though UDM’s Blackboard course site has proven extremely reliable over the last several years, it’s never a bad idea to be prepared for the worst. If you’re concerned that a Blackboard outage may affect your students’ ability to attend a synchronous Collaborate session, this post will walk you through the steps necessary to create a back-up Collaborate room which you can invite your students to in case of a Blackboard or campus internet outage.

Before we get started, let’s talk briefly about when setting up a space like this is a good idea.

IDS recommend using this as a backup only in cases when a synchronous session absolutely cannot be cancelled or delayed in the event of an outage. Why? Because UDM’s Blackboard Collaborate license limits the number of sessions UDM can run simultaneously. If every class taught online ran a backup session as well, we would not have any sessions left in our license to run the regular online classes. So while this process is useful as backup, please be judicious in its application.

Back up your students’ email addresses

First, you’ll want to back up your students’ email addresses. Do do this in Blackboard, click USERS under the USERS AND GROUPS heading.

Users

To ensure all students are displayed, make sure NOT BLANK is selected in the search pull down list.

Select NOT BLANK

The fastest way to copy email addresses is to hold the control key (CTRL) on your keyboard and click near but not on the the students’ email addresses. By doing this, you’re clicking on (and selecting) the table cell that contains the email address. Once you’ve selected all the email addresses on a page, you can paste those cells into a Word, Excel, or Notepad file. Save this file with an appropriate name (e.g., CRSE1000-01 Backup) and set it aside, we’ll need it again in a minute.

Name and schedule your back-up Collaborate session

Next you’ll need to set up your backup Collaborate session. Under the COURSE TOOLS heading, choose COLLABORATE, then click the CREATE SESSION button.

createSession

Label your room in a way that will identify it as a back-up, and not the primary room (to work as a backup, this room will need to be set so all users join as moderators, a setting you probably won’t want for your usual room). For this example, we’ll be using the name Back-up (Blackboard Outage) Room.

Name and Time

To ensure our room is available any time Blackboard might go down, we’ll set this session to run the duration of the course. Unfortunately, you cannot set up a repeating session for your back up room — each repetition of the room is a separate instance and therefore has it’s own guest link (which we’ll use to access the room in case of emergency). Remember, when scheduling a room, both the start and end times have to be in the future AND be set in 15 minute increments (times ending :00, :15, :30, :45).

Need a backup for more than one of your courses?

You can use one backup session for all the courses you teach on Knowledge. If you need a backup for multiple courses, just click the SESSION TYPE heading and choose SHARED. Then use the ADDITIONAL COURSES drop-down list to choose all the courses you’ll want to use this session in as a backup.

shared

Enable In-Session Invitations

To get your students into the room without having access to the course site, we’ll need to allow in-session invitations. To enable this feature, click ROOM ATTRIBUTES to open the Room Attributes menu, then click the OFF button on the Allow In-Session Invitations line, switching it to on.

invitations

Roles and Access

Usually, Collaborate uses account information from Blackboard to determine whether or not a user should be a room moderator. As a result, without the link to Blackboard Collaborate will have no way of telling who should have moderator rights. And with no one acting as moderator, there will be no way to enable the rights to access the whiteboard, turn on voice chat, web camera, etc. To get around this issue, we’ll need to give anyone who joins the room moderator rights. While this may result in a slightly chaotic session (depending on the demeanor of your class), it’s better than no session at all.

To make sure anyone who enters the room has moderator rights, click ROLES AND ACCESS to open the menu, and check the All users join as moderators box. Then SAVE your session.

roles and access

If you really don’t want to allow all members to have moderator rights, you can instead choose ALL PERMISSIONS under ROOM ATTRIBUTES. This will allow all users access to voice chat, the whiteboard, and video, but won’t allow you to do things like turn on and off recording.

Get and save room link

Last, we’ll want to get the link that would get sent out to in-session invitees. To do this, we’ll need to launch our Collaborate session. Once the session is up and running, click the menu button at the top-right of the PARTICIPANTS panel and choose INVITE PARTICIPANTS.

invite

This will pop open a window with invitation content that could be emailed to prospective guests. Click the COPY LINK button, then open that file we created earlier containing the email addresses of all your students and paste in the link.

copy link

Now, should you need to get the class together for a synchronous session at a time when Blackboard is unavailable, you can open this file and email this url out to all your students.

Hide the right-side tools pane in Adobe Acrobat

If you’re using Adobe Acrobat Reader to view PDF files, you may find a significant portion of the right side of your screen taken up by one or another tool panel. By default, you likely see a panel that starts with an EXPORT PDF heading. This provides access to tools available if you pay an fee for Acrobat. To hide this panel, click the Tools heading above it, as seen in the picture below.

Acrobat Tools

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