You can communicate and interact with an individual or group of students in your course using the many tools available in Blackboard. By employing a blend of communication techniques, instructors can foster collaboration with and between their students.
Need more personalized help? Request a Tool-Focused Consultation with OIT staff.
Using Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome, go to blackboard.ohio.edu and login with your OHIO email and password. Select the Courses link in the menu along the left.
Blackboard course sites become accessible to the Instructor of Record eight (8) weeks before the course start date. For more information, please see the Find Your Courses Bb Help page.
Students are unable to access Blackboard until they are enrolled in at least one active course or organization. Students are enrolled in Blackboard two (2) weeks prior to the course start date, then on a rolling basis twice daily (2am and 2pm) as the data feed is updated by the University Registrar. A period of up to 24 hours may be necessary before a student's enrollment populates based on when the student registration processes.
All Blackboard courses are "private," and thus inaccessible to students, by default, which allows instructors to build content privately until they are ready to share the course with students. Courses will be labeled in the course list as "Private," further indicated by a closed padlock icon, until they are opened to students.
For more information, please see the Make a Course Available to Students Bb Help page.
To make a local copy of your course or organization, please see the Export and Archive Bb Help page.
Please note that the instructions will provide you with two options: Archive or Export.
An archive file contains FERPA protected information suck as student information and grades. Do not use the archive option unless you can properly secure the file. For more information about properly securing a file, please see the Student Education Records Storage page.
An export file contains only the information created by the instructor and does not contain any student information, therefore it can be stored on your computer or a cloud storage option like OneDrive.
Open the course in Blackboard and look at the top of the course navigation menu along the left of the course entry page. Following the Course Name, you will find the Course ID enclosed in parentheses. A Blackboard Course ID looks something like this: MATH_1234_101_LEC_SPRG_2019-20
Blackboard course sites become accessible to the Instructor of Record eight (8) weeks before the course start date. The Blackboard learning management system allows you to add a wide variety of content, including, but not limited to, online lectures, multimedia, tests, assignments, and links to external websites.
For information on creating new content, reusing content from a prior semester, and customizing when content is made available to your students, please see the Course Content Bb Help page.
Need more than eight (8) weeks to develop your course? You can create a test course in which you can build content that you can then copy over once your semester course has been loaded. For more information, please see the Create a Test Course in Blackboard: Instructors page.
Blackboard offers flexibility with regard to setting up assignments within your course. You can create assignments in content areas, learning modules, and folders. Assignments may be configured to accept individual submissions from students, as well as group submissions where one group member submits an attempt on behalf of the entire group. Additionally, you can control when the assignment is available to students, set a due date, allow single or multiple attempts, and even add a rubric for the assignment. For more information on creating, editing, and grading assignments, please see the Instructor Questions About Assignments in Learn Bb Help page.
Blackboard provides a customizable Grade Center where you can easily access and begin grading student work in order to provide timely feedback in multiple formats. Instructors can generate reports and access individual, class, and assignment/test statistics. The Grade Center can be configured to automatically calculate course grades as a running total, not only simplifying your end-of-term grade submissions, but also keeping students apprised of their status throughout the term. These are just a few of the features offered by the Grade Center.
For more information, please see the Instructor Questions About Grading in Learn Bb Help page.
Officially registered students are automatically loaded to Blackboard courses two (2) weeks before the course start date. Instructors can also enroll additional users, such as TAs or facilitators, choosing appropriate course roles to grant varying degrees of access to a course, and later remove those users. Please note the manual enrollment procedure is unique to the OHIO Bb environment and does not align with the vendor's published documentation. You can find step-by-step instructions on the Manually Add Users in Blackboard: Instructors Help page.
In Blackboard, there is a course shell for every section of each course. At times, it may be more manageable for an instructor to combine the enrollments of all the sections into one course which contains the course materials. The merging prevents duplication of effort for the instructor when updating multiple course sections. For details on merging the enrollments of multiple sections into a single course, please see the Combine Course Sections in Blackboard: Instructors Help page.
The Course Copy feature can be used to copy course materials from one course shell to another, such as from a template course to a term course or across multiple live sections. For example, if an instructor has four sections of the same course one term, they can save time by developing content in only one section and then using the Course Copy feature to duplicate the content in the other three sections instead of recreating the content four times. For details on how to complete a course copy, please see the Complete a Course Copy in Blackboard: Instructors Help page.
Use the Blackboard Instructor mobile app to view content, grade assignments, and communicate with students.
To request the restoration of an archived course, a current Ohio University faculty/staff member enrolled as an instructor in the course may email servicedesk@ohio.edu with:
Please allow 5 to 7 business days for your request to be processed.
To request the review of an archived course, a current Ohio University faculty/staff member enrolled as an instructor in the course may email servicedesk@ohio.edu with:
When your request is processed you will be granted access to view the course for 1 week to make your determination.
To request the deletion of an archived course, test course or manually created course, a current Ohio University faculty/staff member enrolled as an instructor in the course may email servicedesk@ohio.edu with:
To request the deletion of an organization, a current Ohio University faculty/staff member enrolled as a leader in the organization may email servicedesk@ohio.edu with:
