Hi Stephen
As I think I have posted similar here before (but what the heck).
We have allowed self creation of user accounts (for staff and students) - and
for anyone anywhere for that matter :) http://blackboard.linst.ac.uk
And have encouraged courses (where appropriate) to enable self enrolment -
thus putting the onus on the students. One benefit of this, in our
circumstances, is that the student/staff member must provide an email
addresses when they create their own account. When we batch create students
we do not know their email addresses - and this has resulted in many more
problems! (i.e. students not receiving emails and lots of bouncing emails and
error messages).
I don't know if this will prove to be a good decision in the long run. But as
we can quite easily recycle sites, remove users and then recreate them in a
more formal fashion (maybe with fixed emails), then I can't see why it should
be. And this way we leave things as flexible as possible - which is in the
forefront of my mind. If students get caught up (or lost) in the enrolment
process then at least they can still access Bb. There is also the issue of
remembering (and generating see below) usernames.
Hope this is useful. I guess it depends on you circumstances. We have again
taken a pragmatic approach and only put courses online when they request it,
rather than just creating all the course sites no matter whether they are
used or not, as i have heard is the case in some institutions. This must be
very frustrating for students and I think would be very detrimental to a
VLE's success. I think the initial reaction is very important as is providing
an impetus to participate and reasons for returning (i.e.new content and
consistent/reliable updates).
Out of interest, what have other institutions used as user names? We opted
for student ID numbers (when we batch enrol) as this is consistent and
unique. But the students' network username is created on the fly when they
create their account (so we couldn't use this). And the bar code number
(which is different from the ID number) is used for the Library account ID. I
am currently trying to fathom this whole area as we are moving to L3 (or
LS-Learning System) 'whose' key added functionality seems to be the
integration with other systems - Library, Network, Registry, etc... (using
LDAP I guess?). Does anyone know about this area? Is it possible to mary
multiple IDs? [actually I am going to post this as a separate post - to try
and draw attention to it]
Now off to check out the BB user manual for the LS - to fathom the
customisation and personalisation aspects - wish me luck ;)
cheers,
ben
Stephen Barry wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm working for University College Dublin and had a query relating to
> student registration on BB for next semester. I wondered is their a more
> administrator friendly way of registering about 1200 students, as opposed
> to all of the batch text file stuff we've been doing up until this point?
>
> Is their a way for students to create their own accounts without
> compromising the security of the system?
>
> I would sincerely appreciate any assistance with this matter or would be
> delighted to hear some of the issues that arose if anybody implemented BB
> registration in this fashion.
>
> Thanks
>
> Steve
--
IT Research and Development Unit
THE LONDON INSTITUTE
65 Davies Street London W1K 5DA
web: http://www.seeingdrawing.com
--
BlackBoard / LInst Ønline (staff support)
http://online.linst.ac.uk
--
|