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Master Course vs. Teaching Site

The Master course has been part of your course development throughout this seminar. How is a Master course different from an “official course”, or what we often call the Teaching course site?

• A Master course is used only to develop and store the content, assignments, and media for your course
• Student accounts are never loaded into a Master course.
• The Master remains on your course list indefinitely so that you can keep it fresh.

When you are finished developing your course within your eCampus Master course, you will copy the content from the eCampus master course into an official Teaching shell.  Each semester, you must request an official course shell for teaching (Boise State login required). The Office of Information Technology creates a semester-specific Blackboard course and links it to student registration and instructor accounts. When the request is fulfilled, you will see your teaching shell in your list of courses where you are the instructor. Students will not see the course until you make it available.

NOTE: Your teaching or course shell is not a complete course. In comparison with an on-campus course, your teaching shell is like the classroom schedule that reserves a room for your class. The next step is bringing the course content and activities into the location where you and your students meet. The next steps on this page will outline how to add the content for your course into the teaching shell. This process is repeated prior to the start of each semester.

Maintaining Your Master Course

The course eQIP Master Course life cycle is briefly illustrated in the following diagram.

The eQIP Master Course life cycle is quite simple:

1. The Master Course is the one you’ve been using to design and develop your course in this seminar.
2. You copy your Master course into the Teaching Site and prepare it for teaching in the specific semester. Instructors typically adjust and improve the course while teaching it.
3. After you have taught your course at least once, the coordinator of the eCampus Quality Instruction Program invites you to participate in the Quality Matters™ Peer Review. This fulfills the last portion of your Agreement with eCampus Center. The eQIP Coordinator works with you to clear out your Master Course site, and copy your Teaching Site into the Master Course for the review.
4. The Coordinator then enrolls three Boise State faculty peer reviewers with Student roles to review your Master Course and give you feedback on the success of your design in meeting Quality Matters Standards.
5. You review their feedback, meet with one of our eQIP Faculty Associates to discuss the review, and then make suggested course improvements in your Master Course site.
6. You can now copy your Master Course into your next Teaching Site.

Preparing the Course Site for Students

There are two main ways to populate your Teaching shell with content from your Master: copy all content in one transaction, or copy content module-by-module as you complete it.

The module-by-module approach requires you to carefully copy module content, test, surveys, pools, and discussions, then step-by-step, rebuild any course links pointing to discussion boards, journals, and wikis; redeploy tests, surveys, and assignments; and manually copy and paste text instructions for course links and assignments from the Master course to the correct spot in your Teaching shell.

Note: The module-by-module approach tends to be used most often when a course is not fully developed at the start of term and is more labor intensive in the long run.

The benefit of performing a complete course copy is that all content, assignments, tests, surveys, pools, discussions, blogs, wikis… are transferred over intact. The benefits are clear: you can perform a complete course copy and minimize the human error inherent in the module-by-module approach to course copy. More importantly, you are available to focus on your students and the teaching and learning tasks that require your attention as your course is being taught. 

Because the Master course shell does not contain any student enrollments, you need not worry about deleting student data before your new students can access the Teaching shell. However, you will likely need to make some edits to the prepare your course for students once the content has been copied into the Teaching course. These edits may include:

• Entering specific due dates into the module checklists, and anywhere else you put a specific date in your course
• Setting availability dates for folders, assignments, tests and discussion forums
• Putting students into Groups
• Copying or creating group discussion board forums, group wiki templates for each group (group content is not copied, even in a complete course copy)

* Be careful if you choose to assign due dates to graded items, as this feature will sort the student view of My Grades. If employed, be sure to review the list of Due Dates in the Gradebook to identify anything that may be missing a Due Date. Anything without a due date will be listed at the bottom of the stack of items in the student view of MyGrades, which can be confusing to students.

A week or so before the course is scheduled to begin, you will make the course available to students and send an initial email as explained earlier in the seminar. Your email will include instructions to begin the Getting Started module.

For subsequent semesters, most faculty find it easiest to copy the latest teaching site (without student content) for use the next semester, then complete the edits needed to prepare your course for the next group of students.  Alternately, you are also welcome to maintain an updated Master Course to use for the initial course copy each semester.

PLEASE GO: Review and download this guide on how to Copy a Course  (Google Slides presentation) as PDF

For Module-by-Module or folder-by-folder copying, see Copying Content Items or Folders.

A checklist is available to help you complete the tasks to prepare your course for each new semester, regardless of the process by which you transferred the content from your Master course shell:

You may wish to save and print this Online Course Preparation Checklist (PDF).

Managing Course Revisions

As you teach your course, you will likely identify opportunities for improvement along the way. It’s important to come up with a manageable strategy for tracking changes you’d like to make before the next semester as your course is being taught. Here are some ideas:

1. A menu item titled Notes for Next Time may be added to your course for this purpose if you choose to use it. You would hide the link from students.
2. You might create a Google document titled, Course### Revision Plan, and provide a link to that document from your course in an area that is hidden from students. The Google document is available in your Google Drive as well as Blackboard, should you wish to access it without logging in to Blackboard.
3. While teaching your course, create an item that is “not visible to users” within each module to record ideas, announcements, and such.
4. Save often. Once a content item is deleted in Blackboard, it cannot be recovered easily. Strategic use of the content copy function can also keep you from losing valuable revision history: Before you make a substantial change to content, make a copy of the original item and keep it in a safe place within your course. Just remember to rename the copy as a backup and make it “not visible”. Delete the backup when you are through with it.
5. Add an asterisk to the title to flag items that are still in development.
6. To update attached files and documents, especially those files linked from more than one place in your course, you can replace the file in the course Content Collection and still maintain any links to the original file.

Using the Master Course for Multiple Sections of the Same Course

If you happen to teach one section of a course that has many sections, your department chair may want to use your Master course to seed the Teaching shell for each section, thereby ensuring that students across all sections will have the same learning objectives, same content, and the same assessments. In other words, using a Master can greatly improve the consistency of the learning experience across different sections of the same course. Check with your chair to discover whether the department plans to use your Master in this way.

If your Master will be used to populate more than one section of the course or more than one instructor will teach the same course at different times, spend a few moments thinking about how you will manage the Master with respect to the other instructors. Questions to ask yourself include:

• Who will have chief ownership of the Master?
• How will that person work with the other instructors of the course to make changes to the Master?
• Who will copy the Master to the other sections?