On November 30, 2006, OIT created an empty Blackboard course shell for all Spring 2007 courses listed in the UMBC Schedule of Classes (SOC)with assigned instructors. Using the "Auto Enrollment" OIT process, only officially registered students will be automatically enrolled in all Bb courses as they officially register.
Courses that don’t have assigned instructors will be created as they are added to the Schedule of Classes by the Registrar’s office. If a course has been added to the SOC and does NOT have an instructor, a default "Staff" instructor will be assigned, so the course shell can be created in Blackboard and auto-enrollment from myUMBC enabled.
If a "real" instructor is later assigned to the SOC (and thus the Blackboard course shell), he or she can "modify" the role of the "staff" instructor to any role below the peer status of an instructor (control panel -> list/modify users), and then remove the "Staff" user from the course (control panel -> remove users). Technically, Blackboard will not allow any user to remove a "peer" user in the system, but the change role status works.
Alternately, faculty can request to have the "staff" instructor removed by sending email to blackboard@umbc.edu.
Note: Because some students (and faculty) have mistaken enrollment in a Bb course shell as official UMBC course registration, OIT has turned off the “self enrollment” function in all new Blackboard shells.