Office of Academic Programs
Blackboard Basic FAQs
Make your Blackboard course available
When Blackboard creates your new semester course, it is set, by default, to be unavailable to students. The assumption is that you will want time to prepare the course before opening it for students.
To make it available to students
- Go to the Control Panel of the course.
- Under Course Options, select Settings.
- Click Course Availability.
- Select Yes and then click Submit.
Add a TA/GA to your course
Adding a TA or GA to your course is not difficult but it takes two steps.
Enroll the TA/GA
- Click Control Panel.
- Under User Management, click Enroll User.
- Enter the TA/GA last name and click the Search button.
- Check the box to the left of the name and click Submit.
The default access level is student, so the second step is to change the access level to either instructor or TA. The only difference between TA and instructor access is that a TA cannot remove an instructor from the course and if a course is unavailable to students, the TA won't be able to see/access it.
To change the access level
- Click Control Panel.
- Under User Management, click List/Modify Users.
- Enter the TA/GA last name and click the Search button.
- Click Properties to the right of the TA/GA name.
- Under 4. Role and Availability - check TA or Instructor.
- Click Submit.
Hide the links to courses from previous semesters
It is possible to control which courses display in your My Courses pane in your Blackboard My UNCG page. You can change which course links display to you at any time. For example, you may wish to hide last semester's courses once they are over.
To choose which course links to display
- Click the pencil icon in the header bar of your My Courses pane.
- Choose the attributes for each course you wish to display (probably only Course Title and Announcements)
- Click Submit.
Copy course content to another course
It can be a big time saver if you copy your Blackboard course content to the next semester's Blackboard course. Blackboard has two sets of functions - Export Course and Import Package, that is designed to copy most or all of a course and Copy (for an item or folder) that is designed for copying single documents or folders of documents. See this one-paged Blackboard 8.x Move Content handout for details.
When courses will be removed from the Blackboard server
You can either save a copy of the course by following the instructions for exporting a course in the Blackboard 8.x Move Content handout above, or contact your ITC to have the course exported for you. If you would like to have continuing access to a course, contact your ITC, who can make a Development version of the course on the current Blackboard server.