When we first started here with BB, I religiously followed the course coding that came from the MIS system but it created similar difficulties to those that you describe Janetta. Some poor members of staff ended up with 6/8 nearly identical courses! In reality, lecturers often want to deal with more than one MIS group in the same BB course. For these situations we create a super course; we call it a Module but it is perhaps not well named because Module has another meaning in the Enterprise version.
We often run quite large groupings in these courses, like all the Basic Skills students, or put all the plumbers, decorators, electricians etc into a Health and Safety module. Because we have escaped from the MIS framework we cannot automatically enrol students of course, but most lecturers are happy to search and enrol the students themselves - it beats having to upload three or four sets of the same course materials! I make a point of building all the enrolments I receive from the MIS into a master file so I can sort that and quickly pull off a csv file to batch enrol all the users on any set of courses if I have to; it only takes moments.
We treat these modules as permanent courses and refreshing the students and announcements is about the only maintenance they require at end of year. This is in sharp contrast to all the copying and recopying (not to mention peering into courses to see if they have been used)we need to do to keep in step with a cohort of students on a 3 year course as they progress through the MIS codings - like your system, ours keeps allocating fresh codes.
There may be problems ahead for us when it comes to tracking students and auditing courses but in the short term this approach has brought a lot more staff on board and I take the view that the VLE has to work for the teachers, not the other way round. The Modules also make the deployment of NLN resources more economical. We have to do a lot more customising for these courses (we do still run about half on the MIS codes)in order to identify which students, and teachers, need access and that means a lot more talking and mailing.However, I find that is beneficial because I get a much clearer idea of what is happening in the departments and am building up a very nice collection of good practice examples for the next INSET occasion!
Happy to explain more if you're interested,
John Green
Blackboard Administrator, Northbrook College, Sussex.
-----Original Message-----
From: Blackboard/Courseinfo userslist
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Jannetta Lewis
Sent: 14 October 2004 14:56
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: delete course content
Hi All
Is there perhaps someone that has a solution to this problem? We are
using Blackboard 6. Because of the way that BB has been implemented at
our college, a course, eg Psychology AS, might end up as three different
courses in Blackboard, eg Psychology AS Group 1, Group 2 and Group 3.
This happens because our MIS allocates each group a different course
code. However, lecturers want exactly the same course materials in all
three course codes. At his point in time I only know of three ways to
get these materials accross from one course to the others: 1) do it
manually, 2) use copy course, 3) use export and import.
Option 2 will work fine for lecturers, except than when you copy
materials across, existing materials are not overwritten. So, if you
copy materials from course A to course B, make changes to A and copy it
again, you end up with everything duplicated in B. You can off course go
and delete everything, which brings me to my question. Is there a way to
delete all course content in one go! I realise one will loose all
tracking information, but I think for some lecturers that won't matter.
Another question would off course be whether anybody has any better
solutions to this problem, apart from suggesting us changing the course
codes, because I have tried that and the answer is NO.
Regards
Jannetta Lewis
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New College Durham
Product Development Co-ordinator
X4434
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