Video 4: Getting Valuable Information to Your Students
You have worked hard to make sure that your student receive a wealth of valuable information through your course site. In this video we’ll look at ways to ensure that this valuable information isn’t obscured by irrelevant or old content that doesn’t need to be there. This is especially important for courses that have content that has been copied from semesters-passed.
Using course copy to copy your content from an older course to a new one can save you a lot of time, but beware the pitfalls! Course Copy in Blackboard is additive, not “replaceative”. Meaning, if you have content already in your new course, using course copy will not replace that new content with the old content, it will simply add the old to the new. Even if two items or content areas have the same name, they will both appear, one will not replace the other. Courses that have been copied from one semester to another several times will often tend to accumulate duplicate content. Needless to say, this can get in the way of your students finding the valuable content they need in your course.
You can freely delete any content you do not need. You should regularly review the content in your course to ensure that you have deleted anything that will not be needed, or at least made this content unavailable to your students so they do not see it when they enter your course.
One particular area that can accumulate a lot of unnecessary clutter is the Grade Center. Now, students do not see the Grade Center like you do, so you might think that the clutter in that area is only something that instructors have to worry about, but this isn’t the case. When students view their My Grades page, they see not only assignments and grades that they have already completed, they see every grade center column that has not been explicitly hidden from them. If you created a Grade Center column for Assignment #3, but then decided you’d rather skip that assignment after all, students will continue to see Assignment #3 when they view their grades, unless you delete or hide that column from students. A lot of phantom assignments appearing there, takes the My Grades page from a valuable resource for self-monitoring and motivation into a list of things your students may or may not actually have upcoming in their course. Students will begin to ignore all of the information contained there, since they can’t know whether what they are seeing accurately reflects their progress. You can use the Student Preview function, turned on with this eye icon at the top of the page, to view the My Grades area to make sure that all information there will be relevant and valuable to your students.
To get a top-level view of ALL the columns in your Grade Center (this can help identify old, unused and hidden columns very quickly) use the Column Organization view. If you notice items in this view that are greyed out, that means they have been hidden from your main full Grade Center view (but not necessarily from the students’ view—hiding a column from yourself and hiding it from your students are two separate actions). To delete an unwanted manually-created column (that’s anything other than a Test or Assignment administered entirely within Blackboard), pull down the column’s menu and select Delete. To delete a grading column that is tied to an Assignment or Test given in Blackboard, you must delete that test or assignment from the content area in which it’s located.
When students log in to their My Grades view, they should only see assessments they have already completed and assessments that are upcoming for them in the course.Be aware of what’s visible to your students by using the Preview User and viewing My Grades. You won’t see any grades there because the Preview User hasn’t taken any assessments in the course, but you will see everything that they will see as far as upcoming assignments. Use the column organization view in the full grade center to get a top-level birds-eye view of what’s in there. Especially any hidden or duplicate columns. You can also see the dates the columns were created, which can help you to identify grading columns that were put there several years ago and several course iterations ago. You must unhide any hidden columns before deleting them but then you can delete them straight from the Grade Center if they were manually created. But if they were created as a Test or an Assignment made in Blackboard then you have delete the original assignment or test before that grading column will go away.
Finally, you can control when content is displayed to your students using Time and Date Restrictions on all content items and assessments. If you would rather your students not work ahead or be able to view content that is not relevant yet, use this setting to display content in a just-in-time manner. Time and date restrictions can be placed on all content items, content folders, Assignments and Tests.
In order for students to get the valuable information that you are offering to them in your course, everything that is visible to them should have value. Purge duplicate, old and unneeded content that has been in your course because of Course Copies, or because of previous iterations of the course. Keep a clean Grade Center, both for yourself and so that students can monitor their own progress with no question marks surrounding what they see in their My Grades view. And use time and date restrictions when you don’t want students working ahead or becoming distracted by viewing upcoming content rather than what they should be working on right now.
And we certainly hope that you found the video serious valuable to you. Thank you! Educational Technology Services is here to consult on all issues surrounding Blackboard and the use of instructional technology at Pitt. We can be contacted via email [, phone [412-648-2832], an in-person consultation, and through the Tech Help for Instructors link that is included in every Blackboard course shell.