On this page, you will find a walkthrough on how to structure your course for the virtual learning environment.
The first thing you will need to do is create a place on Blackboard for your course materials. Your materials should be created in a format that allows for browsing on a weekly basis. Each folder for a given week will have that week’s name, and potentially dates to guide students to the proper content. You may choose to only show students one week at a time to prevent them from working ahead without guidance.
To create these folders in blackboard, navigate to the Content or Weekly Schedule folder (the folder where you likely already have content. If you’re using a template for Comp II or I, this likely already says Weekly Schedule instead of Content). You’ll want to select “Build Content,” and then “New Content Folder.” Name the folder the week that you’ll be working on. The text field below the Name field can be used to provide dates that the week covers as well as any other guidance you want to provide for students. Once the folder is created, you’ll be brought back to the page you created it on. Please note that all content that is created by default ends up at the end of the page. You may have to click and drag things up if you want to move them. You will need to follow this step-by-step process for each folder you create. Again, you’ll want one per week.
After creating the folders, you can click the Item Options arrow next to the folder’s title and select Make Unavailable. This will hide the folder to your students and give you time to work on it without them seeing the work. It also will provide you with a way to hide content that students are not ready for. Some students tend to want to work ahead in online courses, and this is often not to their advantage as they proceed through content quickly with no checks to make sure they are properly learning as they go.
Once you have a weekly folder, you will need to create a schedule for students moving through the course. Regardless of your meeting schedule, your course now operates on a weekly calendar. The content that you would cover in two days or three days will now be spread out over the course of the entire week. At the top of each weekly folder, you will need a guide for the week as the first post. Go to Build Content and select Item. The Title of this should be something akin to Schedule for Week X. This content item will be where you will set expectations and flow for the course. You should at the minimum include the scheduled readings for the week, any items that you will be creating that students will need to review, and any assignments for the week. This content doesn’t have to be in this single list item, but it should be referenced. Think about this post as the To Do List for the week. It might look something like this:
Reading Assignment
Writing Assignments
Once you’ve created this first item, you’ll then need to follow through with the other content for the week. Ideally, you will order this content so that as students scroll or read down the page, they will encounter links to content in the order you plan on them working through.
Once you have the master schedule for the week, you need to provide readings for the week. Normally, students would be reading content and then coming to class to discuss or work with it. In our online classes, this won’t be the case. Instead, you’ll need to guide students through the readings from start to finish with supplementary materials. You’ll use the same Build Content, Item menu choice to add this bit to the schedule. Do this for each individual reading assignment or for them all at once. If the readings are to be done with a gap between, I recommend separate items. This keeps students on track and going step-by-step
As many of our courses are for undergraduates that may not have taken online courses, you should provide a rough sketch for how to pace longer readings throughout the week. You might recommend the first chapter is read by Tuesday, and the second by Thursday, for example. Major assignments should be due weekly, but you can encourage work and small deadlines during the week.
When providing the readings, remember that your students don’t have you there to guide them. You will likely want to type up a short introduction to the chapter and a quick walkthrough of what you think they need to pay attention to and pull out of the chapter. You can also include some generative questions for them to try and answer as they go to make sure they’re getting things down. This introduction might look something like this:
In this story we’re reading this week, “The Corpse” by Mike Mignola, you’ll be introduced to a standalone tale in which Hellboy is working in Ireland in 1959. Pay attention to the various mythological tropes and characters that are introduced in this story. See if you can identify superstitions and folk tales that are woven into this narrative. This story is central to many later events in the Hellboy series, though we’ve not gotten to that point yet. As you read, create a rough outline of the story and major events and players.
The goal of this pre-reading snippet is to simply orient students to what they are reading and why it matters. Again, you have to think about the way your students will be coming into these texts. They will not have sat through a lecture in the previous week where you teased this reading. The groundwork laying that can be done in a simple prompt like this can have a huge impact on student success, directing their attention to the places you feel are most important in this new classroom environment. If you need to attach a reading as a PDF, you can do that by creating an Item and then attaching the file with the pre-reading prompt in the body of your post. You can also contact the library for information on how to direct link in your Blackboard courses to their resources and holdings.
Once you have a reading, the next thing you should consider is adding an item that will address your equivalent of a lecture for the students on the subject. Since you aren’t meeting face to face, you need this supplement for students to be guided through readings and key points. In a traditional online classroom, you could create a video lecture. In our situation, that may not be ideal. Students with accessibility challenges are not as well served by video content, so text-based content is often a good default option. If you wish to create video content, please make sure your students do not have any barriers between them and accessing it. For example, if a student has a poor internet connection, videos will be a struggle for them.
The easiest way to go about this type of work is to simply type our the equivalent of a lecture’s notes. Be mindful of formatting issues—have regular paragraph breaks and use things like headings and subheadings when creating content so that students can re-read and access important tidbits quickly and repeatedly as needed.
You could create PowerPoint slides, but I would recommend against it. I would rather you use a Word document attached with images inside. PowerPoint works best when 10% of what you’re saying is on the slide and 90% of it is being spoken aloud. It is not a natural transition for an online class outside of the video format, a format that as noted above has issues in our situation. Make sure your lecture notes are located directly after readings, giving students a way to progress through the week’s content. The format should be something akin to the pre-reading guidance listed above. Again, focus on what students must/should pull out of any given reading.
In addition to providing a reading schedule, you should also provide assignment scheduling for students. Each assignment should have its own item, just as each reading should have its own item. Depending on your course goals, you may have different types of assignments. I’ll list a few popular options below that you can use as a starting point. As you go through this, keep in mind that your assignments should have two major goals: 1) guide students through the materials, ensuring they are getting a firm grasp of concepts in the course, 2) assess students progress in the course. Each assignment doesn’t have to do both things. Many assignments in an online course simply exist to make sure students are doing due diligence as they go through the materials.
As we’re going to have students relying on the materials we create for them to progress through the course, a Quiz can be a useful way to check that students are indeed making progress in the course and following the reading schedule. The Tips website has a guide for creating tests and quizzes for Blackboard, and I would recommend you follow it to create such content for your course: https://tips.uark.edu/create-a-test-exam-quiz-or-survey/
When creating a quiz or test, keep in mind that these will be, by necessity, open book. Your goal here is not to make sure your students have memorized key concepts. The goal here is to make sure they’re going through the content as you intended.
One very popular way to keep students involved with each other and sharing on the topic of the course is to have a Discussion Board for the week. Discussion prompts can give students a way to share their thoughts in a manner that allows others to read and contribute as well. This isn’t a one to one replacement for the classroom discussion, but it does help get us at least part of the way there.
To create a discussion, you want to navigate on the Blackboard course menu to the Discussion link and click on it. Once there, you’ll need to create a forum for your discussion. You can do this by selecting “Create Forum.” I would recommend creating one forum per week, naming the forum after the week that is associated with it. This will be where students post their work. In each forum, you can either have students create their own threads or you can create a single thread for responses. Don’t worry about grading the forums. It never works very well in Blackboard in my experience. This is to keep students together and talking, not to measure perfection.
If you’re creating a discussion, you’ll want to link to it. You can do that in the Weekly folder by going to Build Content and then Course Link. You can then use the Browse button to find and select the forum you want to link to. In the Description area of the link, you can provide your prompt for the students to write from.
Many times it can be helpful to create a weekly writing assignment for students in the course. This is a longer piece that is used to assess their progress for the week. You can grade this with some level of scrutiny, though a Pass/Fail is more than fine. The goal here is to create a touch point where you can give students written feedback on their learning in the course. These prompts should be used to tease information out of the students from the week and to make sure they’re putting things together properly. To create an assignment, go to Assessments (same menu as Build Content), and then to Assignment. You’ll want to stipulate the name of the assignment, the instructions, attach any files needed, select a due date (midnight on Sunday is recommended), add points, and submission details. I recommend unlimited submissions because students will invariably mess up and then need you to clear their response otherwise.
An answer might look something like this: This week, we covered “The Corpse” and “The Baba Yaga” by Mike MIgnola. Each of these stories incorporates folk tales and legends into their general arc. How do you see these folk tales being adapted to fit the story of Hellboy? How do these stories change when they are taken out of their original format and adapted for Hellboy’s story?
or
This week, we’ve covered Newsletters and Editorials. These are two genres that tackle sharing information from different perspectives. How does the role of the author shift from the newsletter to the editorial? Is the author more important in one rather than the other? How does the tone change between these two? What types of audiences and topics are best suited to each of these genres?
Again, as you draft these assignments, think about what you want students to do with what they’ve learned and how you can create a submission that will let you give them meaningful feedback.
As you create your course assignments, you also want to think about when you will have major assignments. Major assignments are those heavily weighted texts that you will give students that will reflect their final grade. Please note that as we are dealing with a truncated semester with less than ideal conditions, you will want to alter your approach to drafting and grading these assignments. Students are not going to have the same experience that they would normally come into the end of the semester with. The process to create the assignment is much the same, going to the menu and creating an Assignment. With that said, I would recommend you do that a bit differently for Major Assignments. For Major Assignments, I would recommend a top-level folder at the top of your Content folder. It should be above the various Week 11, Week 12, etc. folders. Call this folder, Major Assignments. In it, create each individual assignment with a due date. This allows students to see what is coming and plan their working load accordingly.
Once you have those created, simply follow the same steps that you used in creating the Discussion Board links. Go to the menu in the folder of the week the assignment is due, click Build Content and then Course Link. Link to the folder with the major assignments. As the assignments have a due date, they will show up for students elsewhere usually, but this ensures students know where to go when they complete these assignments.
As with your readings, you want to think about how to frame your assignments. Normally, you might pass out the assignment prompt and then talk about it in class, sometimes over multiple weeks. We can’t do that in an online course, so you want to provide some introductory materials on the assignment when you post it. Explain what the assignment is about, what students should be doing, and why they are doing it. You may need to be a bit more verbose than normal, but keep in mind that your students don’t have you lecturing or talking about this in class. They just have the prompt.
Now that you’re done with your week, you will want to review the week. Does everything that happens this week show up on the Weekly Schedule at the top of the page? Do you order each of the readings, notes, and assignments in the order that they should be read through? Are there any things missing that you should include? Once you’ve checked this off, you can then go back to your Content folder. There, click on the arrow button next to the week and select “Make Available” to let students access this work.