What a lot of questions your mail raises Carol! There are probably a dozen
different approaches to this and the way colleges go about it will depend
upon the choices each makes made about creating and copying courses.

We have been creating ALL the full time courses whether we knew they would
be used or not and populating them with students. This means everyone is on
the system and correctly associated, though of course they do not see course
links as the courses  are turned OFF by default. (We have links to Student
Services, Learning Centres, Library and a Student Forum so there is a point
to adding everyone.) We complete both course creation and student enrolment
by batch files from the MIS system and although there are a lot of
unnecessary entries, it can be completed in a day. To make this initial
batch as large as possible, we find the ideal time to undertake this is the
end of the Summer but we will always create courses manually for those who
want them earlier.

Do you copy and recycle courses? Our MIS course coding system renames 2 and
3 year courses each year, so continuing students are re-enrolled to a new
course code. This entails a lot of copying and recycling of BB courses
because a tutor will want to preserve 1st Year materials for continuing
students AND copy them for the incoming course. Obviously if we left all
this till the last minute we would be very unpopular so we begin to enquire
about what they want us to do about half way through the Summer Term. As
soon as I have their instructions (not easy to obtain)I  begin creating
these new courses manually and start copying,archiving etc. Last year we
fixed a Year Code on them to distinguish them from the old set but, come
September, we found several tutors had built new material into the old
courses instead of the new ! One way we found to avoid this was to paste a
large, clear announcement in the new course to alert them to the fact that
they were opening a copied course ready for the new Academic year.

When we first started with BB we thought it was very important to mirror the
MIS data in BB and ensure that inspectors/auditors could track students in
the correct course codes. This now seems very inefficient and I am moving
away from it to a more modular approach. In this scheme,we create permanent
course "containers" that we call modules, the tutors populate them with
materials and themselves enrol the students they need to work with. For lots
of situations this works much better and we have some course modules like
Basic Maths that contain 150/200 students. They are managed by half a dozen
tutors who create, find and share the resources. At the end of the year we
leave the content intact and just flush out and replace the students. Far
simpler, but it has a downside when it comes to tracking and assessment
since filtering out results from the Gradebook is a bit of a headache.

I'm seriously considering creating all courses on demand next year rather
than putting them all in. It's been rather satisfying up to now to show
tutors that we are ahead of the game - they are usually quite surprised to
find their course waiting with the students already on board - but it means
I have a lot of weeding to do at the end of the year! I'm seriously hampered
in this now because the Version 6 no longer displays the size of the course
on the Properties Page. That was an easy choice before. No Mbs? - delete it!
There is probably a log somewhere that would tell me the same information
but I do miss that little feature.

I will be interested to hear how others handle these issues  - and what you
finally decide to do.

Best regards,
John Green
Blackboard Administrator








-----Original Message-----
From: Carol Baker [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 26 February 2004 11:25
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Creating courses for next academic year.


Could I have some views on when is the best time to create the courses for
the next academic year.  We will be completing our first complete academic
year this summer and as Blackboard is not part of a MLE I will be creating
next year's courses myself.  At the moment I have had some requests for
Easter but I am concerned that staff that have only just started using
Blackboard will be thrown if they see next year's courses appearing at this
date.  What do others think?

Carol Baker
VLE Administrator
Nescot