Tim Evans Blackboard Tips Page

Blackboard is the Virtual Learning Environment used by Imperial College. It is designed around an American style course and so is horribly mismatched to the style of teaching at Imperial. Blackboard is clearly a very powerful system but its power seems to completely miss the mark of what a lecturer at Imperial needs and wants. Perhaps if Imperial matches its teaching style to Blackboard it would become brilliant. Currently the grading system in Blackboard is not even recommended for use here. So someone has paid an awful lot of money for an inappropriate system that just causes lecturers at Imperial to spend more time than they would have done just putting up their own web site, posting things on their own Facebook course page, etc. A list of my particular current issues with Blackboard looking for solutions is below.

However lets be positive. Surely people have taken a lot of care (OK, at least time) building Blackboard so surely there is a way it get it to add to my teaching? Below are some of the useful links and tips I have picked up.

Blackboard Basics

• The best view of a course is found under My Courses. Note that you get a very different view and functionality of a course if you access it via Course Content. A quick access route is via the drop down menu under the login name/message alert box top right of the screen as that records recent courses visited.
• To download all the reports submitted through a Turnitin report link in one go do the following. Those sent to Turnitin are placed under

  Course tools - Turnitin assignments

  . You can select all files by ticking box on left side of the header column to select all docs. A button then appears on the right side around the header row allowing you to download them all. They are put in a zip file and files appear to carry initial and name prepended to them. I found that when downloading the Turnitin versions, I was given the option of the original file which then maintains the quality of the pdf.
• Assignments are the way to just get material uploaded by students without going through Turnitin. As Turnitin may mangle the quality of pdf files (I found it offered original quality and this seemed to be OK), you might get a second copy of the report this way and perhaps code used in a project. To find these files get the official list of students in

  grade centre - assignments

  . Then right click on column of assignment and select download. Currently all physics students appear in this list not just those doing my course so use filter button to only select those with something to download. When on the download page, to be sure I clicked the show all button (bottom right) then clicking the select box in the header column selected all students with something to download. See assignment help.
• Set up a Blackboard group for the teachers on the course. I set this up by hand using "manual enrol". You just have to scroll through looking for those with some special status in brackets after their name, its not too hard to do (though why Blackboard can not select itself this way ...). Once you have such a group then you can email just to this group, post files within this group etc.
• You can also use groups to restrict access to a folder or any other document. Move the cursor to the title of the folder or item and then click on the arrow that appears to the right of the title. Under the menu which appears then select adaptive release. Leave all sections as defaults except for the membership section which should have your pre-defined groups.

• Blackboard Help is available within the product itself. Use the Help link at the bottom left hand corner of the Blackboard page.
• Imperial ICT have a useful range of Blackboard help material.

• The list of people on a particular course seems unrelated to those registered.
• A teacher cannot alter the user list.
• I can not find a way to test the system as a student except by having an artificial student account created for me. For instance to test the submission of material. I have had only partial success trying it out various submission as myself.
• When I send out an announcement, if I tick the box sending out an email, many uninterested students get the email. On the other hand if students don't login to Blackboard they won't see my messages about the course. See registration issues above.