Blackboard Course Rollover involves a number of related processes, and these are now very nearly complete.
- Course copying
- Course copies requested before the main Rollover day were carried out on Saturday 29th
- Additional requests are being dealt with as they come in.
- All course copies carried out so far are shown as COMPLETE on the Status page at https://www.reading.ac.uk/blackboard/bbcopy/Home/Status
- There were queries with a small number of course copies – IT contacted the relevant staff for clarification and all but a handful are now complete.
- Blank course shells
- These have been created for all completely new modules and programmes.
- In Reading School of Art, and the School of Psychology and Clinical Language Sciences, which have their own custom course template, new courses have been created from the appropriate template.
- Staff enrolments
- Staff enrolments were copied forward as part of the rollover process.
- In addition, Module Convenors have been automatically enrolled on the 2019-20 Blackboard course for their modules.
A few tasks remain, which will be carried out by our IT colleagues over the coming days. These include
- Assigning courses to a School / Department category – so that Support Centre staff can use their admin privileges to access courses and enrol staff as appropriate.
- Assigning the relevant modules as ‘child’ courses of 2019-20 Merged courses.
- Hiding the Total column in the Grade Centre of 2019-20 courses (see this post from 2015 for an explanation of why we do this)
Queries?
If you have any questions about your Blackboard courses for 2019-20, please log a ticket with it@reading.ac.uk
The following information may help to answer some common queries.
Why do 2019-20 courses have a course code ending in ‘MOD’?
This is new for 2019-20. Any Blackboard course which represents one or more RISIS module occurrences will have a course ID in the format AB1XYZ-19-0MOD.
This applies to Blackboard courses bringing together multiple occurrences of the same module, as well as ‘merged courses’ which combine two or more distinct module codes.
The change has been driven by technical requirements, and should have minimal effect on end users. If you’re interested in the technical details , please see this explanation on our Staff Help site.
Merged Courses
The course name for merged courses now includes the word ‘Merged’ immediately before the academic year, so that these can easily be identified by staff.
Please note that your students will still see the name of the RISIS module they are actually enrolled on, even when in fact they are being redirected to a Merged Course.
For example, the Merged Course AP3A103-19-0MOD Horticultural Crop Technology (Merged 2019/20) pulls in enrolments from AP3A103 and AP3A105.
Students will see the course listed as AP3A103-19-0A Horticultural Crop Technology (2019/20)
or AP3A105-19-0A Global Issues in Nutrition and Health (2019/20)
but will in fact all be accessing the merged course.
Staff Enrolments
Module Convenors: you are probably seeing rather more courses at the moment than you would like. For instance if you are the module convenor for AB1XYZ you are probably seeing 2 courses, AB1XYZ-19-0A and AB1XYZ-19-0MOD.
The former will be shown as (unavailable – Child course of AB1XYZ-19-0MOD) and can be ignored. IT will look at removing these redundant enrolments – you need take no action.
Student Enrolments
RISIS switches to the new academic year on 1st August, and student enrolments for 2019-20 courses will start to flow through to Blackboard shortly afterwards – probably in the week beginning 5th August.