Bb 9.1 October 2014
Continuing with the Bb Rx series of Bb Tips for faculty whose Blackboard courses may be in need of a tune-up, this week’s tip focuses on a fairly common problem, one that is, nevertheless, quite easy to fix: courses containing old imported announcements that are still visible to students, even though they provide outdated information.
The problem can be summed up as follows: your course announcements represent one of your primary means of communicating with your students; and if you’ve imported announcements from an older version of your course, but you’ve left visible to your students announcements that contain outdated information, the role of the announcements in providing your students with guidance/clarification over the duration of your course is significantly undermined!
The Bb Rx for this problem can take one of several forms. If you import old announcements into your course, but plan to update and re-use those announcements, one solution is to simply set the individual, old announcements as unavailable to students, so that you can subsequently update the announcements and make them available to students, as needed.
If you wish to avoid the task of manually “tweaking” your old announcements, you may consider applying one of the following “fixes:”
- Do an export/import from your old course into a z-area (either your default z-area or a new z-area that the DL Office creates for you at your request), but include only announcements in your export file. Using a z-area as an “announcements repository” is the best solution if you are doing an export/import from a Fall course into a Fall course or from a Spring course into a Spring course. Why? The old course, along with its announcements, will disappear after 30 days into the new semester, after which point, you would lose access to the old announcements. Since z-areas do not have such a “shelf-life,” you can store old announcements in them with impunity.
- Do not include course announcements when you create the export file that you plan on importing into your new course. Instead, on an as-needed basis, copy/paste the announcements from your old course into your new course, where they can then be updated and made available to students. This would be a recommended fix in a situation, for example, where you are doing an export/import from a Fall course into a Spring course, or vice versa. In this scenario, your old course would not disappear before the end of the semester, so you could consequently use it without worry as an “announcements repository.”
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 feel free to contact the Distance Learning Office (629-7070/DLHelp@hvcc.edu) if you have any questions about this!
Published: Mon, 08 Feb 2016 13:00:17 +0000 by m.petersen