We are pursuing similar solutions to Henk's. We felt it was important to reflect the original MIS course codes in our Blackboard setup, in readiness for subsequent audit trails but felt sorry for tutors who were then obliged to upload their content several times if they were running multiple courses. We are now creating additional "courses" which we call Modules.Tutors build their course once in the Module and enrol students themselves from the original course containers. These original courses are still the main vehicle for course announcements, communication and group activities.

We are also preparing a "concealed"course where we will store college-wide content like the NLN objects. As Henk says, everyone must be enrolled to this course but we do not want them to browse it. We have found that by entering SPACES in the title when the course is created it produces an icon on the Home Page but no link. The icon is almost unnoticeable.

Courses you are teaching:


Admin Practice

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It occurs to me that we ought not to need to be so creative, surely these are universal needs. Why hasn't Blackboard accomodated them, I wonder. John Green Blackboard Administrator

----Original Message-----
From: Henk van Rijssen [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 18 March 2003 18:55
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Duplicating courses or entries

Hi Simon,

We had a similar problem with courses offered at different locations to differrent classes.
We have solved it a little bit different by making one master course, which contains all the content (let's call it the content course). We also made one master course for the class/group with in it the links to f.i. course documents or to course information in the content course. This way we only have to make all links to the content course once. This course we could call the original class course.
Both courses can only be changed by the owner of the content course (academic staff) or system administrator (for the original class course).
Suppose we have 5 classes that will use the same content course. We make 5 copies of the original class course and enroll each class to one course. All these (class) courses already have the right links to the content course. We also give each class one (or more) instructor(s).
Important thing is that you have to enroll all students from these five classes also in the content course. Otherwise they can't get in with the links from the class course.
To prevent students to get into the content course directly we've disabled the link to that course in Blackboard. You can easily do that by placing the </a> tag before the course title. That way you still see that you've been enrolled in that course, but the link isn't shown as you can see in the picture (the last three courses are "content courses", where students can't get in directly.

Since batch unenrollment isn't available in Bb version 5.5. basic you're only stuck with one problem at the end of a course: how to get all students out of your courses?
For our class courses we just delete them completely from the system (we can easily make new copies from the original class course).
You only have to remove all students from the content course by hand.

HTH(a little)

regards,

Henk van Rijssen
ROC de Amerlanden
the Netherlands

18-3-2003 +0000, you wrote:

Your help is needed......
We have several courses which are near duplicates: some are run part time, block release, day release etc.; we also have units used in several courses, especially in Health and Safety.

Now my dilemma is, how do I set the courses up? There are a few options as I see it (and probably more that others have thought of). We can duplicate the course and run each separately, requiring several courses to be updated if a file is changed. We can link to files in a master course, requiring only the one master copy to be modified (but I have to set up all the links). We can run one course and set up different user groups to allow for the different courses. Or we can do something else!

I would be grateful if people can let me know how they've set up their own systems. Please also bear in mind that I would like to give the academic staff ownership of their own course, reducing my workload. For information, we run the basic version of 5.5, will migrate to 6 when it's sorted, and run Windows 2000 server.

Regards,

Simon Forster
Web development