Help finding your way around Blackboard – for staff and students
A reminder that our staff help pages at https://sites.reading.ac.uk/tel-support/ contain a wealth of information about how to use Blackboard, Turnitin, Stream and other technologies used in teaching and learning.
If you’re still getting used to the new Blackboard navigation, please check out our Ultra Base Navigation introductory guide and video.
Ultra Base Navigation top tips:
- On the Courses page you can filter by the courses you teach, filter by academic year, search for a particular course, and mark courses as favourites so they stay at the top of the list.
- Customise the images on your ‘grid view’ course cards with a banner.
- Choose which Activity Stream notifications you receive by choosing the settings icon in the top right hand corner.
Please direct your new students to our help site at https://sites.reading.ac.uk/tel-support-for-students/
Here they will find plenty of guidance on getting started with Blackboard and the other online tools they’ll need to use. A good place to start would be our 5 minute Welcome to Blackboard video
Bookmarking Blackboard
Many of you will have added Blackboard as a Favourite / Bookmark in your browser. If so, please make sure the address you have bookmarked is https://www.bb.reading.ac.uk/ – some colleagues may have saved a different URL in the past which will no longer work correctly.
Inserting images and other media files in Tests
It is now possible to insert images and other types of media into more types of questions in Blackboard Tests – for instance in the answers for Multiple Choice and Multiple Answer questions, or within the text of an Essay question.
It is also now possible for students to insert media and other files into their response to for Short Answer questions.
For more details see our guide to Creating and deploying Tests
Changes to My Content
This is a little-used area of the Blackboard Content Collection where users can store personal files. With the vast amounts of storage available through OneDrive, it is now largely redundant, and we have agreed with DTS to wind down use of this area. From 4 October 2021 you will no longer be able to upload new files to your My Content area. Read full details of the changes to My Content.
Merged courses in Blackboard
If there are any outstanding requests to set up merged courses in Blackboard (where 2 or more modules are taught together) please submit these as soon as possible, so they can be set up before term starts, and before EMA Integration processes have been run for the coming year.
Archiving and deleting old Blackboard courses
In accordance with the University’s VLE Content Management, Retention and Disposal schedule, DTS will shortly be archiving Blackboard courses which ran in 2016/17 and deleting courses from the 2012/13 academic year.