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With all of your design documents completed, you are just about ready to begin hands-on course development. Here, we explain the use of a special kind of site in Blackboard for building your course.

Using a Master Course Shell

Since the majority of eCampus courses at Boise State are offered through the Blackboard course management system, it stands to reason that you will need a site in order to build your course. A course shell is simply the framework in Blackboard for holding the content, assignments, and so on of a particular course. For our purposes here, we will explain two types of course shells in use:

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Think of a Master as a repository/update space for your course that never goes away. By the end of this seminar (or shortly thereafter), when you have finished building the development site and you have requested an Official teaching shell from OIT, you will be able to copy the instructional materials from the Master course into the Official teaching shell. Copying from the eCampus Master course that has never had students in it to a new teaching course will save you time and effort!

Another possible use of a Master is to build a single Master course, then copy it into multiple Official teaching sections to ensure that all students taking that course have the same objectives, content, and assessments. If you teach a course with multiple sections, feel free to bring up the idea of a Master course with your department chair. Click the image below to review the course lifecycle.

Using Templated Learning Activities and Assessment Directions

Speaking of saving you time, you will see in your Master a course menu much like what we have in this seminar. In addition, your instructional design consultant will help you develop a sequence of modules similar to what you’ve experienced in this seminar. The eCampus Center instructional design team has developed a number of templated learning activities and assessment directions for online courses. These templated activities and assessments will help you address quite a few of the Quality Matters Standards without lifting a finger, specifically those related to your Course Overview and Introduction (General Standard 1) and to Learner Support (General Standard 7). Your instructional design consultant will help you select the templates that will be of most use to you and copy them into your course for your use.

Building Text in Blackboard

Before you begin developing your course in Blackboard, it is important for you to know a few little tricks that many people use to cut down on the amount of time they spend cleaning up text formatting issues.

Avoiding Lost Work due to Network Issues

To protect against losing work if an Internet connection loss or software error occurs, we suggest you type content in a simple offline text editor, such as Notepad or TextEdit, then copy-and-paste your complete draft into Blackboard Learn.  Copying and pasting from full-featured word processing programs such as Microsoft Word results in the addition of hidden text formatting code that can cause display issues in your course. You can add the desired formatting to the simple text using tools in the Blackboard text editor.

Alternately, you can select and copy all of the text typed directly in Blackboard Learn and paste it in an offline document before submitting it in Blackboard. If your internet connection goes down while submitting, your composition is preserved and you can quickly restore any lost work.

Copying and Pasting Text from Other Documents

Copying and pasting text from a Microsoft Word document into a Blackboard text box can produce some unexpected results. Microsoft Word adds a lot of “invisible” code when you copy and paste directly from formatted documents into Blackboard. This code can only be seen when you select the HMTL button and look at the underlying HTML code for that Blackboard text box. The invisible code often becomes a problem when you try to format the text using Blackboard’s text editing tools or combine text from multiple sources. Consequently, it can be very helpful if you first remove all of the “invisible” code (and hence the formatting) from formatted text before pasting text into the Blackboard text box, and reapplying the formatting using the Blackboard text editor.

To copy and paste content from another document or PDF file into Blackboard, the cleanest look is achieved when you can remove the invisible code.

We recommend you use this five-step process:

Step 01. Select and copy text content from the original document to your clipboard.

Step 02. Paste the copied text into a plain text editor.

• PC users, open the Notepad application and paste the content from the clipboard into a new file. Notepad converts the content into plain text, removing any hidden text formatting
• Mac users , open the TextEdit application and paste the content from the clipboard into a new file. Change the text to Plain Text format (highlight text and click Shift + Apple + T).

Step 03. Select and copy the plain text from Notepad or TextEdit to your clipboard.

Step 04. Paste the plain text content into the Blackboard text box.

Step 05. Reapply text formatting using the Blackboard text editor.

Now that you know about this process for copying and pasting text, you are ready to proceed to the following activity.

As a side note, there’s a known issue when copying and pasting text within the Blackboard text editor.  Hidden code is added to the copied text snippet and is pasted into the document, even if the original text was clean to begin with. To prevent this from happening, simply add the shift key when pasting. i.e.: Ctrl-Shift-V for PC, and Cmd-Shift-V for Mac. This issue will be resolved in a future update.

Important Accessibility: Applying Heading Styles

For accessibility reasons, your Blackboard text should include titles and section headings that are descriptive, informative, and formatted using heading styles in the text editor toolbar. Create a logical, hierarchical order with the headings to help users with screen readers to quickly identify the major sections and subsections of the page. For example, change the text style from “Paragraph” to Heading, Sub-Heading 1, or Sub Heading 2, corresponding to HTML heading levels H4, H5, and H6.

Additional Information Pertaining to Accessibility

Additional readings and guidelines on how to make your course accessible to persons with disabilities will be presented in the weeks ahead.