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.
Note that the course is always available to you.
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-page Blackboard 6 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 6 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.