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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:
| Factors for Comparison | Master Course Shell (Development Site) | Official Course Site (Teaching Site) |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Initial course development, plus continual improvement and storage of course content for multiple semesters. | Teaching, for a single semester. |
| Source | Created for you, one time, by eCampus Center during the eCampus Course Design & Development Seminar | Created by Boise State’s Help Deskonly after you, the instructor, request it each semester. (See instructions here) using LMS Middleware. |
| Enrollees | You (the course developer) and one or more Instructional Design Consultants (never students!) | You (the instructor) and the students for that semester |
| Usage | Your semester-neutral master course stays intact (unless you add to it) so that you can reuse it for multiple sections and future semesters. | After you’ve requested your teaching shell for a particular semester and it has been created for you, you copy your content from your master course to your teaching shell, tweak your syllabus and calendar, edit the dates on your assignments, add students to groups, etc. When you’ve got it the way you want it, you make this teaching shell (which is technically no longer a shell but a full-blown course site!) avaiilable to students. |
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.
Blackboard Tips and Tricks
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:
- Select and copy text content from the original document to your clipboard.
- 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 Textformat (highlight text and click Shift + Apple + T).
- Select and copy the plain text from Notepad or TextEdit to your clipboard.
- Paste the plain text content into the Blackboard text box.
- 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.
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One of the primary goals of this activity is to have you assess your current Blackboard skills, and acquire the necessary training you will need to develop your course. eCampus has developed helpful illustrated how-to documents that you may open in a new tab and print if necessary. Please scan this list and take note of any tasks that you would like to learn more about. You are welcome to practice these tasks on your own, and we will not ask you to accomplish anything specifically for this learning activity. We’ve added an assignment link and ask that you submit a commentary on your experience, however.
Please note that this exercise isn’t meant to transform you into a Blackboard expert! If you find building content in Blackboard super-challenging, or you need more specialized and in-depth help with Blackboard, please work with your Instructional Design Consultant to identify the specific Blackboard tasks that you will need help with to develop your course.
1. eCampus has provided you with a Master course shell, eCampus Master – [your course title].
2. Work with your Instructional Design Consultant to develop the content and activities for your course.
We expect that for the majority of our faculty developers/seminar participants, we will be working with you to create the original instance of your activities, discussions, or assignments, etc. with placeholders for module-specific content. You will follow up our work by editing the placeholder content with the module-specific content of your course. Some of you may prefer to develop your activities in Blackboard independently, and that’s okay, too. You aren’t required to create everything for your course all by yourself. But, it will be important that you know how to edit or revise content in your course.
How-To Documents
Note: All PDF links open in a new browser window. To print any of the linked materials, either scroll to the bottom right or top right of the PDF (depending on which browser you’re using) and click the printer icon as shown.
The following documents illustrate the steps to create the most common features of an online course. Feedback from online students at Boise State suggested they liked the use of the eCampus template for module design. They found that courses were well organized, easy to navigate, and predictable. This allowed them to more easily complete their work without having to search for the needed content in each session. Module design practices are best summarized in the these two documents:
1. How to build activities in Blackboard
2. How to create a module or activity folder in Blackboard
3. How to copy a Module or folder in Blackboard*: Copying Content Items or Folders.
*For courses with a pattern of recurring activities in each module, we generally develop the recurring activities in a Blackboard “Module template”, and then copy the entire “Module template” folder and replace the content placeholders with module-specific activity numbers and content. This saves a ton of time and improves course consistency.
NOTE: The How-To documents below were developed without the numbered activity folders that you have experienced in this seminar.
How to create a reading activity in Blackboard
How to add a link to a lecture video in Blackboard
How to create an assignment in Blackboard
(with or without plagiarism tools)How to create (and link to) a discussion board in Blackboard
How the Grade Center deals with graded tests, discussions, assignments as you create them
As you or your consultant build graded items in your course, notice what happens in the Grade Center.
a. Go to the Control Panel in the left sidebar of your master course and select Grade Center >Full Grade Center.
b. As you scroll from left to right in the Grade Center, do you recognize the column headings? By what principle are they ordered?
c. Select the contextual menu (the double arrow) for one of the items you just created in the grade center table. Use the menu to hide the column.
d. Now go to My Grades in the left sidebar and notice how the assignment, discussion, and quiz will appear to your students. Be prepared to share your observations with your Instructional Design Consultant.
Notice what happens in the Grade Center when an assignment has no due date:
a. Create one more assignment. Call it anything you like. Do not give the assignment a due date.
b. Now go back to My Grades in the left sidebar and notice where the new assignment appears to your students.
Please make use of the valuable resources in Blackboard Help. You may wish to visit Instructor FAQs about Grading in Learn and Grading Tasks pages.
Organizing your Grade Center
There are many tools to organize grade center data. Work with your Instructional Design Consultant to answer questions you may have about it.
Need more Help?
- Go the orange HELP! tab at the top of this screen and “Check out the available times for help from a Blackboard Specialist”
- Check out these online Blackboard tutorials, Instructor Help for Blackboard Learn, which you can also get to by heading to the tab at the top of any page in Blackboard and clicking HELP!
- If you have specific Blackboard questions, contact the Help Desk, 208-426-HELP.
- Use the seminar Discussions forum. Your colleagues may have the same questions, thus using the forum can be helpful for everyone.
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Use this assignment link to respond to the following questions:
How confident are you in building the various activities outlined in your course design map in Blackboard? (quizzes, discussions, assignments, videos, content)
What did you find difficult about the Blackboard Practice exercise?
How long did you spend practicing each of the content types in Blackboard?
What else would you like the Instructional Design Team to know about your experience?
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Burgess, V. Barth, K., & Mersereau, C. (2012). Quality online instruction- a template for consistent and effective online course design. Retrieved from http://sloanconsortium.org/effective_practices/quality-online-instruction-%E2%80%93-template-consistent-and-effective-online-course-des