Spring 2022 Blackboard course availability

On Monday, Nov. 1, the Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence staff will create Spring 2022 course shells in Blackboard Learn, the centrally supported learning management system used by faculty and students at UIC. Instructors associated with the course will be added automatically when it is created, and students will be added two weeks prior to the start of the semester. Starting with the summer 2022 semester, course shells will be created 90 days in advance.

As in the past, course shells will be created without a prepopulated course menu so that instructors copying their courses do not have to delete duplicate menus from the previous template and to give more flexibility in building spring shells. If you’d like to have the UIC template applied to your blank course shell, request a course site template import. The following are some recommendations to get started on building your spring course shells.

Copying from your previous Blackboard course

If you’d like to copy your course, consider first what type of content you will be copying. You can see your course storage by logging into your course site and navigating to the “Control Panel,” then to “Course Tools,” and clicking on :Course Storage.” A screen will display the total storage for that course (see image below). To review all courses assigned to you as an instructor, click “Next” in that window. See this video for help on how to reduce your course quota: How to reduce course storage size: deleting unused files.

While instructors can request additional storage, the Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence would like to encourage UIC instructors to review their courses and take the opportunity to clean them up by removing unused files.

Once you’ve trimmed down any unnecessary content for copying, you can:

1. Copy your own Blackboard course like a pro. It is simple and you don’t have to wait to start working on your course.
2. Request a course copy. Please plan ahead and consider that, depending on demand, the LTS team may take a week to complete this request. If requested in the week prior to the start of the semester or during the first week of the semester, it may take longer than a week.
3. Edit the left-hand course menu to ensure your students have access to the content and tools (e.g. announcements, discussion board) that they need and nothing more. You can safely remove any tools you are not planning to use and add tools you will use.

Contact the Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence Support team at LTS@uic.edu with any questions or suggestions.