Tech Tips for Using Blackboard Effectively

With more than 10,000 distinct campus users, Blackboard (http://blackboard.umbc.edu) has become a popular tool for academic AND general campus web needs. If you’re teaching a class or managing an organization with Blackboard, here are a few tips that will make life easier for your users.

Save & Upload Documents in both Word and HTML

One of Blackboard’s early selling points was that it allowed faculty to just upload their Microsoft Word documents such as syallabi, handouts and assignments. But this only works if your end users have Word AND their browser is configured to launch the application when it links to a file with the .doc extension. This is almost a default action in Internet Explorer, which is used by more than 70 percent of users accessing UMBC’s web site (see http://www.umbc.edu/stats).

But if your users don’t have Word or they’re using Netscape, they’ll likely have to 1) download your document or 2) open up another application to convert/view your Word document. Not exactly a “seamless” browsing experience, is it? Instead, save your Word (or WordPerfect) document as an HTML file:

Almost all word processors have a “Save As Web Page” or “Save As HTML” option and they require no knowledge of HTML—they simply create the same document with a *.htm or *.html file extension. Just upload this file with your word-processed *.doc file, and then anyone with any kind of web browser can see your content immediately. Here’s an HTML version of this article using this method.

Note: If you don’t want to cater to users’ needs, encourage them comply with yours. You might tell students all documents will be posted in Word (or PowerPoint or Excel) and that you expect them to use Internet Explorer. If so, then refer them to the USM Microsoft Agreement so they can install Microsoft software for free. The same holds true for other preferred formats or applications, like *.rtf (rich text file) or *.pdf (portable document file) or Adobe Acrobat. Obviously, this works better for a class because you have a little more control over your learning environment.

Send email (push) and post announcements (pull) about any new Bb content

When you’re just getting started with Blackboard—or your users are new to it—you can help reinforce the habit of checking the site by giving them a reason to do so. If you add a new document or start a new discussion, send them email announcing the content is available. You can reinforce this by posting a Blackboard announcement, which is the default entry point for most course and organization sites. It may seem tedious, but when you’re getting started, it’s an easy way to help make the website a regular part of your users’ experience. Once it is, you can back off.

Delete Blackboard navigation buttons you’re not using

By default, any new Blackboard course or organization site lists all of the navigation buttons. If you don’t want to use a discussion board, or there’s no real difference between “Course Information” and “Course Documents,” then enable or disable these buttons as you see fit. You can do this in Control Panel à “Course/Organization Settings” à “Area Availability.”

Archive older threads in a very active discussion forum

If you’ve got an active discussion board AND you allow users to create their own threads, sometimes there can be a lot of postings to wade through. Users can of course sort these messages by date, author or topic in the forum, but as the course instructor or site manager, you can append older or irrelevant postings to an archive. Select the “Archives” link at the bottom of the forum, create a new archive, and then select the threads you want to archive. You might want to do this monthly, weekly or daily depending on the number of messages. This way, users always see the most current (or relevant) topics, but you haven’t lost threads others might be interested in keeping.

Customize (or Bypass) Blackboard’s navigation with a “Little Bit of Code”

If you’re in an assignment and want to reference another document in your Blackboard site, use HTML to link to it directly—rather than explaining to the user where it is. Just go to the source document you want to link to, click the right mouse button to “copy link location,” then go to the document you want to link from, and paste the code. The HTML code for the source document in Blackboard will look very complex, but you don’t have to understand it. Just wrap it in “quotation marks” like you would in making any web link, and then use a simple “HREF” command to link to it. For example:

This code . . .

Will Display this

<A HREF=”http://www.umbc.edu”>UMBC’s Home Page</A>

UMBC’s Home Page.

Use everything between the < and > characters above, but replace the “http://www.umbc.edu” code above with the source code of the document you want to link to inside Blackboard.

Note: If you’re linking to anything OUTSIDE of Blackboard, your link code will need to look like this:

<A TARGET=_top HREF=”http://www.umbc.edu”>UMBC’s Home Page</A>

If you don’t use TARGET=_top, your web link will display inside the main window of your Blackboard site which can be disorienting to users as they browse that new site (see below):

Basically, every web site manager has to balance ease of use for users vs. ease of site production and maintenance. The key is communicating this in advance to manage everyone’s expectations.