Setting Up Your Course Blackboard Site

Every course taught at NU has a secure course website accessible only to professors and their students through Northwestern's Course Management System, also known as Blackboard. The course website allows instructors to make their course materials-including documents, presentations, sound and video clips-available to their students on the Web, as well as communicate directly with students by email. Most importantly, instructors are able to create and manage their course sites without having to learn HTML or other programming languages. Blackboard eases the publishing of course materials, facilitates evaluation and record keeping associated with a course, and engages students in active learning through discussion boards and group Web pages. For more information, visit http://course-management.northwestern.edu.

New instructors are not able to access their Blackboard site until their payroll paperwork has been processed by the university, but may log on to Blackboard tutorials and training sessions at http://course-management.northwestern.edu/display/cms. Contact course-management@northwestern.edu with questions regarding Course Management access or set-up.

To make your course site available to your students:

• Log in to https://courses.northwestern.edu using your NetID and password
• On the Courses page, you should a list of all of the courses you are teaching. Next to the names of your new course sites, you should see text “[unavailable].” This indicates that your students do not yet have access to this course site.
• Click on the name of the course site you wish to make available.
• Click Control Panel
• Click Settings in the Course Options area
• Click Course Availability
• Click the radio button left of Yes and click Submit

Distance Learning Instructors who have not previously taught an online class will working with the Office of Distance Education at least two months before the quarter starts to review and modify the Blackboard course site. Instructors must have a NetID and password before beginning this process. The Blackboard site contains all course learning content, resources and assignments. Synchronous sessions are held through Adobe Connect, a web conferencing software.

Workshops are available to assist instructors in learning how to build and manage a complete course site on the Web. Workshops include a question-and-answer session and guided practice time. Training sessions are held in the University Library in the Evanston campus. For more information and a faculty tutorial, visit NU's Course Management website or email course-management@northwestern.edu. For faculty teaching online, required training will be offered through the Office of Distance Education.