Book Image

Blackboard Essentials for Teachers

By : William Rice
Book Image

Blackboard Essentials for Teachers

By: William Rice

Overview of this book

Blackboard is the world's most popular commercial learning management system. With Blackboard you can construct and deliver professional quality elearning courses with ease. Its many features, which allow you to manage courses, grading and assessments, and social collaboration, are the standard against which other learning management systems are measured. Blackboard Essentials for Teachers shows you how to use Blackboard's most essential features by guiding you through the development of a demonstration course, built on Blackboard's free site for teachers, coursesites.com. You will also learn more about Blackboard's most important features, such as the gradebook, using clear instructions to guide you every step of the way. By following an example course, this book will guide you, step-by-step, through creating your own Blackboard course. Start by adding static material for students to view, such as pages, links, and media. Then, add interaction to your courses, with discussion boards, blogs, and wikis. Most importantly, engage your students in your course by communicating with them, assessing them, and putting them into groups. Blackboard Essentials for Teachers will enable you to take your elearning course from inception, to construction, to delivery.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Blackboard Essentials for Teachers
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Making Discussion Board available to students


When you create a course, sometimes it automatically has a Discussion Board created for it. It depends upon your installation's course template. However, the board might not appear on the student's Course Menu. In that case, you must add a link to the board, or else the student will never see the board.

The following screenshot shows the instructor's view of the default Discussion Board. The instructor got to this page by clicking on Course Tools | Discussion Board:

In this example, the student doesn't have a Discussion Board link. You must create a link to the board, or link to the individual forums on the board.

Adding a link to Discussion Board on the Course Menu

If you give students a link to Discussion Board, they will see a list of all of the forums in the course. You can also give them links to one forum at a time.

To create a link to Discussion Board on Course Menu, perform the following steps:

  1. 1. From the Add Menu Item menu, select Create...