If you want to get an early start on building your site well in advance of the semester, we recommend using a Developmental Template site that is not integrated with student rosters and is free from the automated process which happens each semester. To get one of these sites, you can submit a Service Request by visiting http://www.uwindsor.ca/bbhelp and ask for a Sandbox Development Template Site. Further, you may wish to make your course copying approach more efficient by requesting Developmental Template sites for regularly occurring courses you teach by semester, i.e. Advanced Basket Weaving (which only occurs in Fall semester each year), or Advanced Trip Planning (only occurs in Winter semester), and then you can quickly adjust all of your due dates set within the Blackboard tools by using the Date Management tool for the number of days shifted between calendar years for when the semester begins.
With your service request, please provide the following:
– Course code,
– Section,
– Semester,
– Other relevant information, and
– your UWin ID (and other instructors, or Departmental Support staff’s UWin ID’s) with your request.
The LMS Team will prepare a sandbox site for you to develop your site in and then you can use it as a template to continue to keep current for future copying of the site. The advantage of setting this type of course site up is that no student work will occur in the site, no time-based announcements which aren’t relevant to future semesters will be in this site, and you can continue to update it on an ongoing basis as much as you wish. When you import your content into the next semester’s automated course shell, you can then use Blackboard’s Date Management feature found on the Control Panel ->Course Tools to update due dates prepared in the course in assignments, tests, etc.
Your requested template course site will be based on the Course Shell template (COURSE_TEMPLATE), so it will look just like a course shell that is automatically created every semester when your course number is listed in the SIS and you have been assigned as the instructor of record.
Once you are notified by the Blackboard LMS Team that this sandbox template site has been prepared, you can build your new template from scratch or use one of the Blackboard utilities available to copy all or part of a previous course into the site.
More details on using these tools follow:
– Course Copy, or
– Export Course, or
If you use one of these utilities, please review contents of the site and adjust/delete as needed in your template.
When you wish to copy forward the contents of this template into an existing (automatically created) semester-based course shell, you will still need to review and make necessary adjustments (i.e. title, term duration, availability, etc. (Customization -> Properties), Further, it is recommended that before you copy materials into the semester-based course shell, you delete the default Total and Weighted Total columns found in the Full Grade Centre of the automated semester-based shell. This will avoid producing duplicate columns if your template’s Full Grade Centre has been pre-configured with all of your hard work! You can always create a new Total or Weighted Total column if you need another one. Also, when you copy from the template site, you will need to review the Full Grade Centre for any duplicate or redundant columns. To see a total listing of the columns in the Grade Centre and the order that they appear in, in the Full Grade Centre, select Manage -> Column Organization. If assessments (for grades) have been created by using a Blackboard tool in the site and you don’t want to use/modify that assessment, please delete from the ”original location” in the site (e.g. Discussions, or Tests, Surveys and Pools tools, or Assignments built in a Content Area), as you won’t be able to access that option from the Grade Centre.
Please visit the UWindsor online Help Wiki at http://www.uwindsor.ca/blackboard or Blackboard’s online help for more details about various tools. If you would like to have further consultations, we would be happy to help. Either submit a Service Request ticket requesting a consultation at http://www.uwindsor.ca/bbhelp, sign up for a Name Your Topic session for one-on-one support, or email a specific question to bbconsults@uwindsor.ca.