Ten Top Tips for a Successful Start to the New Academic Year
1. Do you have access to your “09-10” courses?
Most courses for the 2009/10 academic year have been ready on Blackboard since April and have “09-10” at the beginning of the course title. Blackboard takes its instructor information from the Banner Student Record System. Any member of staff listed as an instructor for a course in Banner will automatically be made an instructor on the Blackboard version of the course. This information is provided by schools themselves.
If you believe you should have instructor access to an 09-10 course but cannot see it in your My Courses list it is likely that your school has not listed you as teaching that course in the Banner student record system. To remedy this, ask your school office to make sure that you are listed in Banner as an instructor for the courses that you are teaching. Blackboard is updated with the latest information from Banner every 24 hours, so once a change is made in Banner it will be reflected in Blackboard the following day.
1.5 Are you aware that the Digital Dropbox will be withdrawn?
Blackboard has announced that the Digital Dropbox function will be removed in the next version (version 9) of Blackboard. The functionality will be replaced with an enhanced Assignment feature. While a firm date for the University to upgrade to the next version has not yet been set iSolutions recommends that you do not use the Digital Dropbox feature from June 2010 onwards.
2. Have you “rolled over” your course materials?
Each Blackboard course begins life as an empty shell. If you wish you may copy over your course materials en masse from last year’s version of the course to this year’s. You can find out more by going to the Rollover section of our Blackboard web site:
3. Did you make your Blackboard course available to students?
When courses are created on Blackboard they are set to be unavailable to students. This 
is so that you may prepare the course and then make it available when it is ready. You can easily tell if a course is unavailable to students, because the word “unavailable” appears beside it in your My Courses list. Remember to make your course available to students before you tell them to use it. To find out how to make your Blackboard course available check this web page:
4. Do you want to tidy up your My Courses list?
After using Blackboard for more than a year you may find that your My Courses list becomes cluttered. You can tidy it up and make it show only your relevant courses by following these instructions.
5. Have you let students know where to find help?
Students contact ServiceLine for help with Blackboard, but it’s worth letting your students know that there is a lot of help online for them too. Our web pages answer all common student questions, in particular how to print and download information from Blackboard.
6. Do you want to add a colleague or a student manually to your course?
The majority of Blackboard courses are populated automatically using information in the Banner Student Record System. However there may be times where you wish to add a colleague or a student to your course manually. Read this web page to find out how to do this.
7. Want to find out how to use other Blackboard features?
Our web pages contain help and step by step guides to using many aspects of Blackboard. So if you want to find out how to add content, use discussion boards, set up tests and surveys, or any other topics please take a look at our web pages.
8. Training
If you are new to Blackboard you may be interested in attending our introductory course, or in using our online training course. More information is available from our training web pages.
9. Have you found out about the new features in Blackboard?
A number of new features have been added to Blackboard, including blogs, wikis, search, and podcasts. A number of changes have been made to Blackboard over the summer with the introduction of Blackboard 8. Find out more online:
10. What to do if you have a question about Blackboard.
If you have a question about Blackboard please read our support web page. This details who you should contact and what kind of information you should supply to help us to help you as quickly as possible.
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