Bb 9.1 April 2014
With the Spring 2015 course shells now available in Blackboard, faculty will begin importing content into their Spring 2015 course shells from earlier versions of those courses. In the process, they will need to update display dates for a variety of items (announcements, weekly module folders, discussion board forums, etc.), and many will also need to update due-dates that they set for their tests, assignments, journals, etc.
A new tool in Blackboard called Date Management can considerably streamline and expedite the process of updating your course display dates and due-dates!
To access and use the Date Management tool in a Spring 2015 course that you have imported content into from an earlier course (the following link points to an excellent, short video that will walk you through the steps for using this robust new tool: Using Date Management), go to your course Control Panel and select Course Tools/Date Management. The Date Management window that comes up will appear much as it does in the following screenshot:
The Date Management tool provides you with three different date-management options (Use Course Start Date, Adjust by Number of Days, and List All Dates For Review), which you choose from by selecting the radio button for an option and then selecting the Start button.
Important note about Blackboard Date Management: If you want to use the Use Course Start Date option in the Date Management tool in Blackboard, be sure to so before you export your course. If you try to do it after exporting, there will be no way to put the old start date in the dialog box, which will have been auto-filled through system programming and can’t be changed.
If you select the Adjust by Number of Days option, you tell Blackboard the number of days that you want to adjust your course display dates and due-dates by.
Using the example of a Spring 2015 course that you imported content into from a Spring 2014 course, you would tell Blackboard to adjust all of the display dates and due-dates in the 2015 course by 364 days, since the Spring 2014 course had a Start Date of January 21, 2014, while the Spring 2015 course has a Start Date of January 20, 2015 (i.e., the dates for your Spring 2015 course need to be moved forward by a year, minus one day).
If you select the List All Dates For Review option, Blackboard will generate a Date Management Review check-list of all of the items in your Spring 2015 course that have display dates and/or due-dates carried over from your Spring 2014 course. The check-list takes a few minutes to generate, and (see the below screen shot) allows you to sort items by item type (using the Item Type drop-down menu), such as announcements, tests, weekly module folders, etc., or (using the Date Type drop-down menu) by date type, such as availability date, due-date, etc.
However you sort your items, you can then edit the date(s) for an individual item or multiple items in one of two ways:
- Select the check box for any item whose date(s) you want to edit (the master check box in the top-left corner of the window allows you to select all of your items at once), use the control at the bottom of the Date Management Review window (it looks like this:
) to specify the number of days by which you want to adjust its due-dates, and then select the 
button to update the date(s). - Select the
button that appears on the far right of each item in the check list, and then use the calendar control that appears to change the date(s) for that item.
Apart from enabling you to update much more quickly the display dates and due-dates in your Spring 2015 course, the new Date Management tool helps you to ensure that your Spring 2015 course doesn’t contain old due-dates, which can cause the students in the course to receive “false alarm” notifications about due-dates that are not actually pending or past (Tell me more about that!).
That said, the type of Date Management option that you select when you use this tool will depend on several factors.
For example, if, using the above scenario, you import content into your Spring 2015 course from a Spring 2014 course, you would want to choose Use Course Start Date or Adjust by Number of Days, since the schedules for the Spring 2014 and Spring 2015 courses will coincide, with the exception of their respective Start Dates, and you can use either option to accurately update your course display dates and due-dates.
On the other hand, if you import content into your Spring 2015 course from, say, a Fall 2014 course, the schedules of the two courses will not coincide, and the display dates and due-dates for your Spring 2015 course would not be updated accurately if you were to use either the Use Course Start Date or Adjust by Number of Days option. In this instance, you would instead want to use the List All Dates For Review option, so that you could use the check-list interface to update your course display dates and due-dates on an item-by-item basis.
Use the following link to download a printable version of this Bb tip of the week: Download the Tip
Use the following link to view previous Bb tips of the week: BBTOTW-Archive
As always, please do not hesitate to contact the Distance and Online Learning Office (629-7070/DLHelp@hvcc.edu), if you have any questions, or if you would like to receive training on this topic.
Published: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 13:22:56 +0000 by m.petersen