Student enrollment added to 2021 Blackboard Courses

Students have been added to their Fall 2021 courses and should now be visible to instructors. Courses will not be visible to students until instructors make them available.

As a common practice, many UIC instructors copy their courses from the previous semester. Last fall was the first time that the university implemented a standard template for Blackboard to provide a familiar experience to students taking classes remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of UIC courses from fall 2020 have a full menu based on best practices for online teaching.

If you’d like to reuse your previous course site, you can request course content to be copied from a previous semester Blackboard course to a new one by submitting a Blackboard Course Site Copy Request form to the LTS support team. Your course copy will be ready within a week of the request receipt. Please plan ahead if you are using this method.

1. Before requesting a course copy (in your old course):

• Check your Course Menu for duplicated items and delete any unnecessary items (in the course menu, click the chevron to open the contextualization menu and click Delete).
• Delete any old files from previous semesters (syllabi, PowerPoints, Word documents, images, unused files) to maximize the amount of storage you will have in your new course. You can find those in the Course Content Collection.
• Organize your Course Content. Move all menus and folders to desired locations. See Move and Copy Content.

2. After course copy (in your new course):

• Update course documents — check syllabus and lecture notes and delete any items that you may have missed before the course copy.
• Update due dates in course assignments.
• Clean up your old discussion boards.
• Delete old Tests, Pools, and Surveys that are no longer used in the course (Click on Control Panel > Course Tools > Tests, Surveys, and Pools > Click the chevron next to the test name > Click Delete’.
• Set the Course Entry Point so students open the course right where you want.
• For more information, see Get Your Course Ready: A Blackboard Checklist

Instructions to copy your own course can be found at Blackboard Learn course copy. Please note that you must be the instructor of record in both course sites to copy one course to another.

Like in the past, your course shells have been created without a pre-populated 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 your fall shells. For more information on building course shells or copying your previous course, please see the recommendations shared in our previous Blackboard course site announcement. For questions or support, please contact the Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence (CATE) Support team at lts@uic.edu