Bb Arbitrary courses

Blackboard Programme Courses

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You can request a Blackboard Programme Course to hold programme level information and communication. Students can be auto-enrolled and the course will appear under a separate heading on the Blackboard Home page. A Programme Course does not hold any assessment data.

How are students enrolled on a Programme Course? 

  • Staff and students can be auto-enrolled onto Programme Courses via their Banner,  programme codes. When you request the course*, include the programme codes, and years, that will be associated with the Programme Course, and we will set up auto-enrolment. The enrolment feed will be updated daily to match programme enrolments in Banner.  
  • Course set-up and enrolments will suit your programme delivery and your definition of a “Programme”. In some areas, one course can be set up for all students in a department, or you could have separate courses for particular groups of programmes, year groups etc.  
  • The course name and ID will not contain a year – the course will not need to roll over each year. New students will be enrolled on the course via the enrolment feed from Banner & old enrolments will be dropped.

What is a Programme Course for? 

A Programme Course is part of the Academic Transitions Support Toolkit and can support Programme. See the CHEP Resouces Hub to view case studies and guidance on how a Programme Course can be used.

  • A Programme course helps to give your programme an identity and sense of community. 
  • Course Announcements & emails can be used for communication with the programme cohort. 
  • Use Blackboard collaboration tools such as Discussion Boards and Collaborate.
  • With the new Blackboard/Teams integration tool you can create a Team directly from your Blackboard course and the Team enrolments will stay in sync.
  • The course can be a place to gather the information that is otherwise repeated in module courses, on Faculty Hubs (programme specific), delivered via other arbitrary courses, or sent via email attachments.  
  • Some suggested content areas could include: 
    • Induction 
    • Careers/employability 
    • Staff Information 
    • Links to related societies and student reps 
    • Assessment information 
    • Sources of help and support 
    • Study skills
    • Events 
    • Key dates 
  • A Programme course should be used to deliver teaching or assessment. Please contact ServiceLine if you feel you need to set up a non-Banner course for teaching purposes. You can also merge separate Banner module courses into a single Blackboard teaching course, please see this guide.  

How will a Programme Course appear on the Blackboard Home page? 

  • The course will appear under a separate heading “Programme Information” on the Blackboard Home page.
  • Course ID will start with PROG-. 
  • You can define the course name to suit the programme.
  • If you are in the All Courses view, Programme Courses are listed under the Term – Programme Information. To group your Courses list by Term see this guide.

We already have an arbitrary course for programme information – can we set up an auto-enrolment & Home Page listing? 

Many areas already have an arbitrary Blackboard course set up to deliver Programme information. 

  • Request a Programme Course using the app in the next section. You will then be able to roll the content of your existing arbitrary course into the new Programme Course. Open a ServiceLine ticket if you would like to speak to Blackboard/Education Application Support about this first.

Request a Programme Course

  • Follow this link to our Programme Course app
  • Use the app to specify the Blackboard Programme Course title and ID.
  • Select your faculty and school to display a list or programme codes associated with your school.
  • Select the programme codes you would like to be included in the Blackboard course enrolments. Use the filter to sort by level and year group (part).
  • Use the > arrow to move the selected codes to the Included column.
  • Select Submit – this will send a ServiceLine ticket to iSoluitons. We will be in touch with you via the ticket to let you know when your course has been created.

Programme course – design guides

Course Banner

The programme course template comes with a course banner. If you want to change or edit the banner, you can download this template (includes instructions on saving and uploading a new course banner image). Programme course – banner template

 

I want to use Collaborate but I don’t use Blackboard

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Return to Blackboard Collaborate For Staff Main Page ↵

Blackboard Collaborate has a 250 attendee limit. If you wish to use Blackboard Collaborate with more than 250 attendees view our guide.

If you don’t use Blackboard but you wish to use Collaborate, the answer is to request an arbitrary Blackboard course for the purpose of using Collaborate.

To request an Arbitrary Blackboard course, complete this simple online form.

Using WebSIS to produce batch enrolment files

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Our batch enrol tool allows you to easily add large numbers of students to your arbitrary Blackboard course.

In order to use the tool you are required to paste in student usernames.  One easy way to identify those students is to use WebSIS.

  1. Go to https://www.adminservices.soton.ac.uk/adminweb
  2. Login and click on WebSIS for Banner
  3. Tick the user id text box so that user ids are shown in the results.
  4. isis1
  5. Use the criteria boxes to find the students you wish to identify, e.g. all students on a certain module or studying a certain programme etc.
  6. Click on Search
  7. That should show all students that meet your chosen criteria
  8. Click on Download and you will be emailed a csv file of that data.
  9. isis2
  10. Open the CSV file and copy the usernames.
  11. Paste the user ids into the batch enrol tool and follow the instructions on the batch enrol tool page.

Course Naming Conventions for Blackboard

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Regular Banner courses

Course Title

The Course title should display the year (14-15, 15-16, 16-17 etc), the Course Title (long name direct from Banner) and the Course Reference Number (CRN) eg:

YEAR-COURSE_LONG_TITLE-CRN

e.g.

16-17-Management Accounting 3_15204

The rational for putting the year first is so that course tutors may differentiate between old and new courses.

Course ID

The course ID should take the subject code, course number, crn and year.

Eg.

SUBJECTCODE-COURSENUMBER-CRN-YEAR

e.g.

MANG3006-15204-16-17

Non-standard “Arbitrary” Courses

These are courses that fall outside the Banner system, for example specialist courses, sub modular courses, project courses etc.

Course Title

YEAR-COURSETITLE

E.g

16-17-Sustainable Waste Management

Course ID

CourseID-Year

E.g

CE-Waste-16-17

How to batch enrol students onto your Blackboard course

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There may be occasions where you wish to add a large number of students onto an “arbitrary” Blackboard course. Blackboard now has a batch enrol feature, but the files it requires are not intuitive to create. We have set up a very simple tool that will create the required file for you. All you need to provide is a list of usernames of the students you wish to add to your course.

You can extract lists of usernames according to the criteria of your choice using such tools as WebSIS and Discoverer. We have a specific guide on using WebSIS you may find useful.

1. Use the reporting tool of your choice to extract a list of usernames.

2. If there are more than 500 students break the list up into groups of no more than 500 each.

3. Copy the usernames and paste them into the box below. Each username should be on its own line and should not include @soton.ac.uk e.g.

abc123
def456
xyz789

4. Click on the Create Batch Enrol CSV File button and save the file on your desktop or other handy location..

5. Open your Blackboard course and in the Control Panel expand the Users and Groups section and select Users.

5. You will be presented with the Users page. Click on the Batch Enrol Users button.

6. Click on Browse for CSV file

7. Select the file you saved from step 3

8. Choose Comma from the list

9. Click on Submit

10. Once the file has been processed you will be informed of any errors. The kind of error you may receive is where the username is incorrect, does not exist, or is already enrolled on the course.