Starting with Fall 2015, Blackboard sites for day courses will be populated with a new template designed to guide instructors in posting a syllabus and basic grades. CPCE course sites will still be populated with the full CPCE template designed for hybrid and online course delivery.
In the future, all templates will have some common features – the Read Me First – Instructors section is hidden from students and provides documentation, support resources, and suggestions for instructors using Blackboard for the first time as well as more experienced users. The Read Me – Students section is recommended as the location to post a course syllabus. The Grades section is the location students will go to view course grades (if you use the Grade Center functions). Having some standard content areas across all courses will, we hope, make it easier for your students to stay informed about your course.
If you are more experienced using Blackboard, LIT will be developing additional templates that can be layered on top of this base. Currently, we have the CPCE template, based on the Quality Matters standards, that supports online and hybrid learning and which can be used to support flipped content instructional models. New templates will be designed to support experiential learning and will incorporate universal design best practices to meet the needs of all learners.
We’ll be presenting on the new base template during WOW week sessions on Friday, August 28th 9-10 AM in Beatty 103.
Access the documentation for Adding a Syllabus to Blackboard.
Recording of WOW Fall 2015 Faculty session: Using the new Blackboard course template and basic Grade Center.