1.2.1 Organizing your teaching drive and uploading your syllabus (3m33s)

Transcript

1.2 “Prepping” in the Course Management section, your private “home office space”

On Blackboard’s home page, in the My Courses module, click on a course in which you are the instructor. Note that your course will be marked as “(not currently available).” You’ll learn how to make it available once you have set up your course.

Clicking on your course lands you on your course’s default Dashboard page. It’s a module page that looks a lot like the Blackboard Home page, except that it has a navigation panel on the left.  You’ll start preparatory work for your course in this navigation panel’s bottom section under the Course Management heading. You can consider this management section your (private) home office space: it’s where you can file and store all course materials, where you go to create learning activities, to view and grade work, etc.  You will return to this space many times during the semester. 

1.2.1 Organizing your teaching drive and uploading your syllabus and other course materials

In the Course Management section of the navigation panel—your home office space, click on “Content Collection,” then on the link with the 20 digits (ignore the other links). As the 750MB space that opens can house all (non-video) course materials for all your courses, you’ll do well to organize it before uploading.  We recommend that you create top folders for each of your courses and that you name them recognizably.

To start, in the Course banner under the blue CUNY banner, on the right, make sure to click the question mark to display the grey banner with the More Help link. [BEEP] Ready? In the action bar, click on the Create Folder tab, give your folder a recognizable name and click on "Submit." [BEEP] Repeat to create however many folders you need. [BEEP] To create sub folders, click on a course folder or open it with the hidden action button to its right, then repeat the process to create other subfolders. [BEEP] If you did create subfolders, to return to the top level, click on the-green-arrow icon under the Upload tab. [BEEP] Lastly, in the right corner of the grey bar above “My Content”, choose how you want your new folders to be displayed. [BEEP]

Now, if you have not done so already, make sure to have all your teaching materials ready to upload them, either as a zip package or as files in a folder. Let’s start! Click on a folder you created, then in the action bar click on the Upload tab and choose “Files” or “Zip Package.” In either case, you can drag the file(s) or a folder if you choose to upload uncompressed files, to the dashed rectangle box.  [Beep] Please note, during the uploading file process, wherever you see the dashed rectangle box, you can drag the files from your local folder and drop them in the dashed box.  Also check the checkbox under the Browse My Computer button, but, in the Options section, leave the check-boxes blank.  When done, click on "Submit." [BEEP]