Managing Content in Aggregate/Disaggregate Situations in Blackboard

• The Issue
• Approach 1
• Approach 2 -- recommended
• Common web content

The Issue

Our automated upload from the Student Information System creates one Blackboard course for each course-section, so if you're in a situation in which you have many course sections of the same thing you may have a large update problem.  You will have to put up the same announcement, test or notes six or seven times. 

Examples:

• One teacher teaches several sections of the same course.
• One teacher teaches a theory with several lab sections.
• One teacher teachers two courses with the same content.
• Several teachers co-operate in the creation of a course site to support many sections of a course.

We can solve this problem for you by combining courses for you.  To request combined courses/sections, send an email to bbhelp@algonquincollege.com. 

Enrolments in the combined sections will update from the Student Information System in the normal way. 

There are several approaches one can take to managing the combined and original (sub)sections (which remain on Blackboard).

Approach one:

Combine courses and make original sections unavailable.  

Under this approach all activity takes place in the new combined section and the teacher uses Control Panel --> Course Options  to make the original (sub) sections unavailable.

This approach resolves the content update issue but creates a gradebook in which all the students from all the (sub) sections are listed in alphabetical order.  Note:  there is no way to sort students by group in the current version of the Blackboard gradebook.

Approach two:

Use the combined course for content for all the sections; use the original (sub) sections for assignments and group work.  The advantage of this approach is that you retain a gradebook that reflects the official Algonquin section and is perhaps most suitable for courses in which many teachers are teaching many sections of the same course.

Combine courses and leave original sections available.  For Example, set Course Options so that in the Combined course Announcements, Staff Information, Course Information, Course Documents, Discussion Groups, Projects, Assignments are on, but the rest of the buttons are off.  In the original (sub) sections, turn on Announcements, Chat, Groups, Student Tools.

Common web content:

Another approach to this issue is to put common web content up on another website (such as your staff web site on academic or on a course web site on elearning) and then point to that content from within Blackboard.

This approach would be suitable for situations in which only the content is common, but you wish to use the communication and student tools within Blackboard for the actual coursework.

An example of this approach can be seen in our Do-it-Yourself Orientation Kit.

If this approach looks useful to you, but you would like our help to implement it, please contact bbhelp@algonquincollege.com 

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Page updated 2002-12-06
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