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Blackboard Tips

Link to the following topics on this page:
Blackboard support
Preparing your courses
Identifying Your Course Site
Course Availability
Requesting an Additional Blackboard Course Site
Forget your password?

Blackboard support

There are two central contacts for Blackboard support: Jeanne Farrell (jfarrell@wheatonma.edu or ext.3629) and Diane DeMelo (ddemelo@wheatonma.edu or ext.3924). Faculty with any questions about Blackboard should feel free to contact them. Faculty or staff who want to learn Blackboard's basic or more advanced features (such as creating quizzes and tests, managing students grades, etc.) can arrange for training by contacting either Jeanne or Diane. Students should call ext.3900 with any questions.

Preparing your courses

Before a semester begins, Blackboard sites are created for all courses and instructors are enrolled in the appropriate courses. Students are uploaded from Banner to Blackboard into their courses immediately before the semester begins. During the drop/add period, new students are added to Blackboard course sites on a daily basis. However, instructors have to manually remove students who have dropped their class.

To remove users from your course follow these steps:

Control panel,
User management,
Remove users from course,
Search by the last name of the student, select the box next to the student's name/type the word "Yes" without the quotations, then submit.

To add new users to your Bb course follow these steps:

Control panel,
User management,
Enroll user,
Search by the last name of the student, select the box next to the student's name,
Submit.

Identifying Your Course Site

The naming convention for courses in Blackboard is consistent with the format in Banner. It is as follows: BIO262A_200410: Plant Biology. BIO262 is the course ID, A indicates Fall semester, 2004 indicates the fiscal year and 10 indicates the fall semester of the 2003-04 academic year. A course ID ending in 20 is a Spring semester course. This naming convention is only viewed from the Courses tab.

Course Availability

Please remember that when new courses are created in Blackboard, they are set to be unavailable by default. Unavailable means your students cannot access the course. To make them available, you need to follow these steps:

Log in to Blackboard,
Click on the course title to enter your course,
Go to the Control panel,
Course options->course settings->course availability.
Select "Yes" and then submit.

Please make your old Blackboard courses unavailable.
Once the semester has ended and students no longer need access to course documents, please make your courses unavailable by following the steps above, but select No and then submit.

Requesting an additional Blackboard course site

If you want to create an additional Blackboard course (for any of the reasons listed below), please contact either Jeanne or Diane.

Additional Bb courses can be helpful to you for the following reasons.

1. You may want to create a Blackboard course for combined courses.
If you teach two sections of the same course, we can create a combined course site for the two sections, and then upload the students who have registered for them into this new course site. You will then only need to post course materials once. For example, the combined course HISP106B01_106B03_200320: Review of Basic Spanish contains sections 01 and 03 of the same course.

2. You may want to create a Blackboard course for connected courses.
As you create connections between courses and disciplines, you may want a special Blackboard course that will allow you to contact or post documents for all students in both courses. You can ask us to create a new course site with a new title for two connected courses, such as Communication through Art and Mathematics for the courses Arts 250: Graphic Design I and Math 120: Mathematical Thought. Then we'll upload the students who have registered for the two courses into this new course site.

3. You may want to use a Blackboard course site for a new special project or for committee work.
For example, BBD130: Vernal Pool Research Team is a project site used by a group of students, and several faculty members are enrolled as instructors to monitor its use.

Forgot your password?

If you forget your password for Blackboard you can get a new password by accessing Blackboard from the Wheaton homepage Quick Links or go directly to http://blackboard.wheatoncollege.edu/.
At the login screen click Login, and then click Forgot your password? Follow the instructions on the screen to fill the right information, and then select Submit.

A message will be sent to your Wheaton e-mail address. Check your email. You will have a message Lost Password Notification that contains instructions on how to change your password. (If any of your students forget their Blackboard password, please give them these instructions as well.)