Blackboard

Blackboard is an enterprise web application that provides for online course content delivery and management. Every course at Duke is provisioned with a Blackboard site. Most Sociology instructors use Blackboard to facilitate their teaching. You may put readings for students in the course. Students may submit their work to you using the Digital Drop Box feature of Blackboard. There is an area for Discussion Boards and you can have as many different threads (topics) as you want within the Discussion Board.

Content Considerations

The files placed in your Blackboard course site may be of any type. You can put articles, papers, pictures, video, and audio files. Basically you may put there just about anything that you want to use in the teaching of your course. Each file must be 5MB or less in size.

General questions on course content, role assignments and functionality are directed to Jesse Riggan, who coordinates departmental use of Blackboard.

For questions relating to intellectual property rights, such as copyrights or fair use considerations, please consult the Duke Library Scholarly Communications Office. Kevin Smith is the Duke Scholarly Communications Officer. His blog provides current reflections on these issues and a pointer to several other offices at Duke dealing with copyright issues.

Blackboard Features

• Multiple people can participate in the building and maintenance of a course site by means of roles the Instructor defines and assigns to others. These roles include Teaching Assistants, Graders and Course Builders. People acting in roles are limited to Blackboard functions appropriate to those roles.

• It is possible to enter student grades in Blackboard and have them sent to ACES and the Registrars Office.
• In addition to providing a place to store readings and other course documents, it is possible to track who has read which articles or documents and when they read them.
• In using the Digital Drop Box, student files are time and date stamped by the Blackboard system upon receipt, so there is little argument over when something is submitted.
• Courses are maintained until you turn them off (make them unavailable). Content can be copied from one course to another with little difficulty. You can archive your courses as well.
• You have the option of making your course available to anyone or to just the students enrolled in the course.
• You can host discussions using the Electronic Blackboard.
• There is a wiki tool available for the construction of wikis.
• You may also create blogs for your course.

• A faculty member may request an Organizational site by completing a Blackboard request form. The request must specify the purpose of the site.

• People who are not members of the Duke community can be granted access to Duke Blackboard sites. They must get a restricted purpose Duke NetID from OIT. This is not a difficult process.

Blackboard Restrictions

• You must be an Instructor to enroll users in a class. This is true of non-course blackboard sites as well.
• Instructors, TAs, and Graders have access to the grade book; course builders do not.
• Only one file at a time may be put in the course documents folder.
• Single file size limit for documents is normally 5MB.
• Only the Instructor has access to the Digital Drop box.
• Course Builders can only add content to the Blackboard course.
• TAs have access to the entire Blackboard site except to the enrollment area.
• There is a calendar that lets you set reminder announcements for things like due dates and tests as well as anything you wish to remind your class about.
• Items that you upload for your students can be made available for the entire course time or for a more limited time that you control.
• Courses are maintained until you turn them off (make them unavailable). Content can be copied from one course to another with little difficulty. You can archive your courses as well.
• You have the option of making your course available to anyone or to just the students enrolled in the course.