As we head down the last stretch of the semester, it’s a good time to recheck our Blackboard course grade centers and make sure everything’s working as it should be. Here are a couple of tips:

1. First, make backups! This is always recommended but of special importance now when we may be making more changes to the grade center and there is potentially more data to lose. Instructions for backing up the grade center are here.

2. One of the trickiest aspects of the grade center is that the columns that the instructor sees (or does not see because they’re hidden) do NOT automatically correspond with what columns the students may see or not see. To hide a grade column from the students’ view, you need to click at the top of the column and select “Show/Hide to Users.” Once a column is hidden from them, a slash icon appears in the title bar of that column. However, if instead you simply chose “Hide Column,” then you’ve selected to hide the column from your Grade Center view. The column will still be seen by students unless you first choose “Show/Hide to Users.”

   The tricky part is that you can only do that if you can see the column. Therefore, you must first restore the column to your instructor view, and then choose “Show/Hide to Users.” To restore a hidden column to your instructor’s view, click the “Manage” button (while in Full Grade Center view) and choose “Column Organization.” Select (with a checkmark) any columns that appear as hidden and click the Show/Hide button, below. Then click, Submit. Once you have restored a column to your view, you can then take the step described above to hide the column from students.

Or… come visit the Dr. Is In for help! See our hours at http://www.uvm.edu/ctl/doctor

If your list of courses is long and overwhelming, there are solutions! You can either:

1. re-sort the list so that your current course spaces show at the top, or
2. hide older courses from the list (and restore them again, if desired)

To learn how, see the CTL How-to page for course list management.

(Note that after a few semesters, courses are deleted from the system so they will no longer appear on your list, anyway.)

For many instructors, the Blackboard (Bb) Assignment Tool is a helpful time saver.  A few of the advantages are:

• there are no papers to haul around—they live in Bb
• feedback and grades can be distributed within Bb
• the rubric tool makes grading easier and more consistent (especially helpful for TAs)

To read more, visit the CTL how-to page for the assignment tool or Getting Started with Assignments [PDF].

A course banner brightens up a course home page and helps users identify the course they’ve entered. Any image can be made into a banner, but the ideal dimensions are shallow and wide.* Text can be added to an image using editing software, such as Photoshop, or an online image editing tool such as picmonkey.com/.

The CTL provides pre-made banners and instructions on this page or come to the Dr. Is In for help.

*If you use the announcement tool in your course, you’ll want to make sure your banner isn’t so tall that it pushes the announcement area out of sight. Read more about that here.