Body
When to Use?
Instructors have many tools and features within Blackboard that foster communication and engagement with students in their courses.
Please find the links to the articles below. Kindly click on the links to access the content.
Procedure
Messages
Messages are a useful way to keep in contact with your students and make their educational experience more personalized. There are also several access points for you to directly act upon information by sending messages to students.
This article covers:
- Messages for all courses
- Unread message notifications
- Messages inside a course
- Read-only course messages for students
- Student workflow
- Send a message
Send Messages
All your course messages and responses are on the Messages page. You can browse the entire list and open a message to read all the responses.
This article covers:
- Messages page
- Send a message
- Send messages from the Gradebook
- Send messages from the Submissions page
- Send reminders from the anonymous submission page
Student Overview
Use Student Overview as a single place to get relevant information on a student and personalize your communications with them.
This article covers:
- Access Student Overview
- Grades Tab
- Progress Tab
- Notes Tab
Discussions
Online discussions provide unique benefits. Because students can take time to ponder before they post ideas, you may see more thoughtful conversations. You can observe as students demonstrate their grasp of the material and correct misconceptions. You can extend your office hours and reach students more often during the week so that learning is continuous.
A sense of community among students is crucial for a successful online experience. With online discussions, course members can replicate the robust discussions that take place in the traditional classroom.
For smaller course groups, you can also offer group discussions where only members of the group may access the discussion.
Create Discussions
This article covers:
- Engage students with online discussions
- Develop successful online discussions
- Create discussions
- Student access to the Discussions page
- Watch a video about Discussions
- Customize discussions
- Auto-generate discussions
- Discussion settings
- Graded discussions
- Discussions created by students
- Discussions or conversations?
Group Discussions
When you create a discussion, you can assign groups to help students feel more comfortable because fewer people are involved. You can also assign a specific topic to each group. For more information about groups, visit the Create and Manage Groups page.
This article covers:
- Create a group discussion
- View groups
- View a group discussion
- Grade a group discussion
- Grade from a discussion
- View group discussion statistics
Manage Discussions
This article covers:
- Organize discussions
- Delete discussion topics, responses, and replies
Search and Collect Discussions
You can search for a certain student's posts. You can also select a name in the Participants list to view that student's responses and replies together.
View Discussion Performance and Analytics
Discussion analysis provides an in-depth look at each student’s discussion participation using multiple metrics.
This article covers:
- About discussion analytics and student activity
- Watch a video about Discussion analysis in Blackboard
- Class level discussion analysis and student activity
- Individual level discussion analysis
- Discussion details
- Types of discussion analysis metrics
- Types of discussion analysis metrics: Substantive posts
- Types of discussion analysis metrics: Sentence complexity
- Types of discussion analysis metrics: Lexical variation
- Types of discussion analysis metrics: Critical thinking
- How we measure critical thinking
- Factors that contribute to the critical thinking level:
- Types of discussion analysis metrics: Word variation
- Hide discussion analysis
- Why don't I see data?
Respond to Discussions
This article covers:
- Discussion etiquette
- Respond to a discussion
- Word count for discussion responses
- Follow a discussion
- Delete responses and replies
Announcements
Announcements are an ideal way to post time-sensitive information critical to course success.
This article covers:
- Announcements on the Activity page
- Announcements inside a course
- Announcements page
- Watch a video about Announcements
- Create an announcement
- What do students receive in the email?
- Schedule an announcement
- Edit, copy, or delete an announcement
Create and Manage Groups
You can organize students into groups so they can interact with each other and demonstrate their knowledge while they learn to appreciate the perspectives of others.
This article covers:
- About course groups
- Watch a video about creating course groups
- Create course groups
- Create custom groups
- Create randomly assigned groups
- Create self-enrollment groups
- Reuse groups
- Course Groups page
- Manage individual groups
- Add and delete groups
- Manage student membership
- Course groups and conversion
Group Spaces for Instructors
Group Spaces provide a list of all assignments for a specific group, as well as a place to view all group members.
Import and Export Groups and Members
You can bulk create groups or add group members in Ultra courses by importing a CSV (comma-separated values) file. This feature also allows you to export groups and members to a CSV file.
This article covers:
- Access the Import Group Sets panel from the Groups tab
- Import Group Sets from the Import Group Sets panel
- Access the Import Groups or Members panel from the Group Sets view
- Import Group Sets or Members from the Import Groups or Members panel
- Group creation template
- Import members into groups template
- Export groups
Journals
Journals are personal spaces for students to communicate privately with you.
This article covers:
- About journals
- Watch a video about creating journals
- Create a journal
- Auto-generate a journal
- Open a journal
- Navigate the Grades and Participation tabs
- View entries and comments
- Edit and manage journals
- Convert and copy journals
- Copy workflow
Email
The email tool allows you to send email to other people in your course without launching a separate email program, such as Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo.
Conversations
What if your students have questions about some of the course content?
This article covers:
- Enable conversations
- Access conversations
- Conversations layer
- Group conversations
Record Video and Audio
This article covers:
- Watch a video about recording feedback
- Record feedback
- Rename your recording
- Recording files
- What do students see?
- Setup your microphone and camera
Create an Email Link in Your Blackboard Course
This article provides a workaround so students can email you from within your Blackboard course.