Blackboard course shells for SU2017 were created on April 18, 2017, on a separate Bb server.

Why? In preparation for UMBC’s migration to Blackboard’s new cloud infrastructure, summer courses will be hosted on a separate server during the transition, similar to UMBC’s previous delivery model for hosting winter courses during system upgrade periods.

Why Are We Hosting Summer Separately?

Since DoIT and Blackboard must migrate UMBC’s current Blackboard site to the cloud over a seven-day downtime (June 30 - July 8, 2017), we are hosting summer courses in a separate cloud environment to ensure continuity of services for faculty and students. However, only SU2017 courses will be available on the summer server; all other courses prior to and after SU2017 will remain on our current site and only faculty who are teaching and students who are enrolled in summer Blackboard classes will see courses on the SU2017 server.

Since summer courses are on a separate site, faculty will need to export content from our main Blackboard site and import to summer course shells in the cloud. 

Look for the summer banner on the MyBb tab in Blackboard to access your summer courses

Please review DoIT’s Bb migration FAQ for complete details about:

• Migrating to Blackboard’s cloud environment (SaaS)
• The migration timeline
• Working in the new cloud environment
• General course access

About Course Creation

Bb shells for SU2017are available for all courses (designated as lecture, lab, field or discussion) listed in the UMBC Schedule of Classes (SOC), provided that there is an instructor of record listed. As new course sections and/or instructors are added to the SOC, corresponding Bb shells are automatically generated overnight. If you need a shell for a research or independent study course, please submit a new course request.

Instructors who teach multiple sections of the same course will find those enrollments merged into one Bb course shell. These sections may be split upon request by an RT ticket, which we recommend submitting at least one week before the semester starts, if not as soon as courses are created in Blackboard.

Student enrollment in Bb mirrors the official registration in SA and updates hourly. However, courses are not accessible to students by default until the instructor of record makes them available.

If you are an instructor, and your name is not associated with the course you are teaching in the SOC, please see your departmental scheduling coordinator to resolve the issue. Once you are listed in the SOC, your Bb course shell will be created automatically. If not, please submit a support request by an RT ticket.

As always, if you have any questions, please consider the following options:

• Check our extensive FAQ collection
• Open a ticket via RT
• Follow the Instructional Technology & DoIT myUMBC groups
• Request a consult with instructional technology staff

In recent years, the Office of Institutional Research and Decision Support  (IRADS) has installed or built a nifty set of “bird’s eye view” reports about teaching & learning in the campus’ Report Exchange (REX) data warehouse that any instructor might find useful. These include but are not limited to various campus-wide Blackboard usage reports such as the following:

Blackboard

• Bb Learn Course Use By College (shows Bb use by students across campus)

• Bb Instructor At A Glance (shows overall use for each instructor’s courses)

• Student At A Glance (shows individual student activity across all Bb courses)

Grade Comparison and Distribution

Similarly, the following "summary level" REX reports could be interesting to instructors who want to benchmark their own courses with peers from any discipline or department across campus:

• Course to Course - Grade Comparison (inspired by Dr. Hrabowski's definition of student success: "not only passing a course but also the next one that requires it.").*

• Outcomes After Course Completion (includes retention and graduation)

• Grade Distribution by Organization (by college and campus-wide).

• Courses by DFW Rate and Average Grade (by course view only)

• Most Popular REX Reports (see what reports others are using)

The aggregate data these summary REX reports provide could provide useful context for understanding any course, but by default, none of them will have “drill to detail” student ID information.

Background

UMBC faculty may recall that DoIT used to publish a list of most active Blackboard courses for every term. However, we discontinued this after Spring 2013, when we completed our transition to Blackboard’s Analytics for Learn (A4L) product that UMBC’s own experience helped influence. A4L reports for students and faculty are now embedded in every Blackboard course (see Control Panel → Evaluation → Analytics), but there is still nothing that provides a “bird’s eye view” of Bb usage across campus -- except the Bb Learn Use by College Report mentioned above.

Why might this be important? Increasingly, UMBC and other institutions are looking at institutional Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Blackboard as a real-time indicator or even predictor of student engagement, not just a static content repository of syllabi and powerpoint presentations. If so, then understanding effective design of LMS courses -- as measured, in part, by students’ use of them -- could be helpful as well.

Accessing REX

Until recently, access to REX itself was granted “upon request,” so one might first want to know what lies beyond the login screen before doing so. However, the summary reports above offer a sneak peek at what REX can do, and are now available to any instructor with access to the PeopleSoft advising system by default.**