I’ve just got back into the office today, after taking a nearly five week vacation. (Yes, I really can accumulate a LOT of vacation time.) I lumped in a good deal of time staying around home, taking care of yardwork and such, and spending quality family time too. However, I also took a thirteen day road trip out to Saint Louis alone, and that made for an interesting experience that I wished to share. Preparing for my trip, I made what is for me a momentous decision: I would not bring a laptop with me on my travels. I’ve lugged laptops with me on flights before, so deciding against bringing...

This week let’s take a look at one of the numerous question types available for use in a Blackboard test: Multiple Fill in the Blanks. As you’d expect from the name, this question type allows for a sentence with one or more “blanks” for the student to fill in. The tricks to using this question type are first to have the right type of question, and second to format the question properly. So what sort of question is “the right type” to use with multiple fill in the blanks? Naturally that’s a matter of opinion, but what I look for is a question that isn’t...

This week I’d like to draw some attention to the Course Copy tool within Blackboard. True, y’all are pretty familiar with using that tool to duplicate materials into a new semester course, but there are some nuances to the course copy settings that you may be unaware of. First off, recall that you do want to start a course copy from the course with the material. In terms of “getting next semester ready” that means go into the OLD course. Under Packages & Utilities on the Control Panel you can go to the Course Copy tool. Here at Palomar we only allow one type of course copy...

No, really. It may be March, but Summer is here already. At least, it is within Blackboard. In accordance with our typical course lifecycle, the Summer 2013 courses have just become available for faculty development on the production Blackboard environment. Feel free to begin copying materials, setting up due dates, and all the other “pre-semester” prep that a new semester brings. Just remember that, even once students start enrolling in your class, they won’t even SEE your Blackboard course until and unless you make the course available to students. Summer is here! So… get to wo

Have you ever had content that you want students to opt-in to receive, but you don’t want students able to opt-out of as the Review Status tool allows? Naturally the Adaptive Release tool will be the key to making Blackboard show the content, but what criteria could allow students to opt-in without being able to reverse the process? Groups. But not just any old Group type; I’m talking specifically about Sign-up Only groups, in which students may sign up to include their name on the group list (so that YOU don’t have to assign them to the group). Then all you would need to do is set an...