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Designing Your Course With Maintenance in Mind

What it is.

There are some tips and tricks that might make it easier to refresh your course for a new semester. It is easy to forget to change all of the dates or instructions for the new semester. If you design your course with some consideration for maintaining the course, you may be able to avoid the most common problems. This section discusses a few general tips to design your course so it is easier to prepare for the next semester.

Implications for Teaching and Learning.

Course copy is a wonderful tool but it adds an exact copy of the previous course to an existing blank course. This means that, not only do you have all of the standard Blackboard menu items, but also any new items you have modified or added. Also, the old dates and other information must be refreshed in the course for the new semester. The easier you make the process, the greater the likelihood that duplicate items, incorrect dates and incorrect information will be avoided. Students perceive empty items, incorrect dates and incorrect information unfavorably. Such inaccurate information will generate a great amount of student questions as well. A well designed course can save you some time refreshing the course for the new semester, reduce some student questions, and let you focus more on teaching than maintenance.

Due Dates.

The more locations where you place due dates - the more locations you must remember to change in the new version of the course. One tip is to place one content item in each class or module that includes the due dates for each assignment and activity in that section. When you are refreshing the new version, you change the dates in this location only. This is much easier than searching through each section of the entire course to find due dates. You may decide to link to this item from other sections of the course. When you modify the item, the links will persist and go to the new, updated information.

Announcements.

When you copy Announcements from one course to your new course, you will also copy any dates you established to release or retire an announcement. This means you will need to go into any of the Announcements you would like to reuse and change dates. Announcements will retire on their own after seven days if you do not override this information by establishing dates. All of these Announcements will be available for your use in the new course on the View All tab. These announcements will be organized by date.

Course Copy.

Blackboard today is incredibly versatile and allows you to organize and name your menu as you see fit. You may decide that the standard menu item "Course Documents" is not specific enough for your needs. You decide to modify this menu item and change the name to "Syllabus". When you copy your course to a new semester course shell, that new shell already has a menu item labeled "Course Documents". Blackboard never replaces content, it adds to what is already there. Therefore, when you copy your previous course content to a new course shell, you will have a menu item for both "Course Documents" and "Syllabus". There is a simple trick to not having duplicate menu items. Before copying a course into a new course shell, first Remove all of the existing standard menu items. Don’t worry, you will get all you need back, when you complete the Course Copy. We must emphasize, only do this before you do anything else in the new course shell. You are removing content when you do this, and you don’t want to get rid of any work you have put a lot of time and effort into.

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