Am I getting confused here? (it's likely, March was
a strange month here). But I thought that this whole thing about sharing
content between courses was supposed to be sorted out in version 6!
The issue of having materials stored once on a system but accessed via
multiple routes is essential to us all. Like many institutions, our MIS
records courses with a different code for each time it is run across the
week, so one course could have 5 (frequently more) course codes. Tutors
won't remember to update the same piece of content in all the courses it is
used in.
The solutions you guys have come up with here are inventive and
certainly workable but should we really have to go to all that trouble? Or
are UK institutions so radically different in our perceptions of 'content'
and course organisation to the rest of the world?
Peter Edge
Web Developer & VLE Administrator
Online
Services Team
Learning Services - Making a Difference
City College Manchester, City Campus, Whitworth Street, Manchester M1
3HB
>>> John Green <
[log in to unmask]> 19/03/03
09:47:41 >>>
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
|
|
GCSE French (unavailable)
|
|
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
