Blackboard Resources and Best Practices

Blackboard Resources

Blackboard Help

Blackboard’s help resource covers a lot of common questions and issues, plus how-to instructions and videos.

ACC Workshops

ACC offers a four-part course for Blackboard:

• IDS: Blackboard 1: Building a Course Site

• IDS: Blackboard 2: Assignments and Assessments

• IDS: Blackboard 3: Grade Center

• IDS: Blackboard 4: Interactive Tools

Other workshops, such as ones for Blackboard Collaborate, are also offered. Check current workshop availability on the ACC workshops page.

LinkedIn Learning (formerly lynda.com)

A number of Blackboard and online teaching video courses are available here.

This video talks about how to use LinkedIn Learning.

Instructions to start your LinkedIn Learning account.

Blackboard Best Practices

Global Navigation Menu

You can access this from the dropdown with your name in the upper right corner of the screen. The global navigation page allows you fast access to things like new posts, project submission updates, and the calendar.

Email

When sending an email through Blackboard, it doesn’t save a record of the email, and you won’t see the email in your Sent folder—you can resolve this by adding your own email via bcc so you’ll get a copy of the email sent to you.

Rubrics

Terminology:

The Rubric Grid lists Criteria (rows) for measuring Levels of Achievement (columns)

Use a general purpose criteria:

Create a criteria row that can be used for general purposes including being late, not following submission instructions, etc. (as opposed to only using narrow, highly specific criteria that do not allow for other problems that can come up). Ten to twenty points is a good range for this.

Use broad categories for criteria:

Fewer, broader criteria will help make grading faster than a long list of very specific criteria. Broader criteria could contain sublists of what is meant to be covered; for example, on a Digital Publishing 1 rubric there could be a Layout criteria that includes layout size, margins, bleeds, and master page settings, rather than try to split those out into several separate criteria.

Create an all-points column (Levels of Achievement) for faster grading:

• If the range is, say, 20 points, the last column can be set to a range of 20 points to 20 points

• The first column could be set to a range of 0 points to 0 points to create a no-points column

• Column in between these contains the rest of the range, 1 point to 19 points (this could be broken into more than one column)

• This will result in a rubric that has at least three options for each criteria section: the first radio button will be worth 0 points, the second will contain the 1–19 point range, the third will be worth 20 points.

• If you wish to assign 0 points or the full 20 points, a single click on that radio button will do it; clicking the 1–19 point range radio button will allow you to choose a point value from the dropdown list

Discussion Boards

• Know the purpose of the board
  Discussion boards should be used to meet specific course objectives and should be aligned with course content. Well designed activities can be used to encourage:

  • Demonstration of knowledge of key concepts

  • Community building

  • Critical thinking

  • Student leadership

• Set clear expectations
  Provide clear, visible expectations regarding number and length of posts, replies to classmates, and deadlines. It’s a good idea to also establish guides of expected behavior, too, such as being respectful, no personal attacks, don’t dominate conversations, etc.

• Start with introductions
  An introduction thread helps students figure out how to use the discussion board in a low-stakes way, and gives them a chance to get to know their classmates.

• Create active questions
  Avoid questions that have a single right answer, or don’t encourage discussion. Prompts that use action verbs like find, explain, describe, and compare will be more likely to engage students.

• Create questions you care about
  Questions should be interesting enough to be worth reading. If you find the discussions boring, your students probably do, too, in which case, are they really learning anything?

• Students discussion leaders
  Students can take turns leading discussions, choosing discussion questions, moderating answers, or writing summaries.

Schedules

For courses taught in semesters of different lengths (8, 10, 12, or 16 weeks), add schedules for each to the Blackboard template, then hide the ones that do not apply for a given semester. This is a much easier process that rebuilding or editing schedules every semester.