Monthly Archives: August 2017

And the Award for Most Frequently Asked Question on the 2-2777 Line Goes too….

“I need to add “So N. So” to my class as a TA (or some other role).  How can I do this?”

Really, I would have thought it would be something more difficult; but it turns out that this is common enough and just barely tricky enough, that it merits lots of support calls.

Let’s walk through it.

  1. Login to Blackboard and enter the course that you want to add the user to.
  2. Go to “Users and Groups

3. Expand “Users and Groups

4. Click on “Users
5. Hover over Enroll User and click on “Find Users to Enroll

6. Click on Browse

This opens this window:

7. I’m going to guess you might not know their username, but you probably know their email (which is also unique – remember, names are not unique). SO….  Use the pull down menu right after the word Search to set to email, leave contains, and click go after typing the first part of their email address into the search field. (exp. jennifer.adams)

8. Check the box next to their name and click “Submit

9. Pick the role that you want them to have in the course… in this case I’ve picked Teaching Assistant, and click Submit.

And that is it!  I’m going to remove Dr. Stanley from this course now.

 

YouTube videos in Blackboard

Blackboard has this cute mashup feature where you can go into your course, go to the content folder of your choice, select Build Content and select YouTube Video.  You don’t even have  to know the URL of what you are looking for… it lets you search by keywords and select the video right there.

but  – the window is smallish and the ability to make it bigger seems non-existent.

So – if you need the video to be bigger…. here is what you can do:

Go to YouTube.com and search for the video you want there.  When you find the video, click on Share…

then embed…

now Show More…

and finally, pick the video size you would like to display in Blackboard:

Copy the code provided… it is the one that starts with  “<iFrame width” as seen above.

Now head back to Blackboard….

Go to your Documents folder (or whatever content folder you desire), Build Content -> Item:

Give it a Name, then click the chevrons in the upper right hand corner of the Text box.

Which reveals more wysiwyg tools:

click the HTML tool and paste in the code from your clipboard:

click update and click submit.

Now you will get this gorgeous and large video, right in your folder – just like this. (This is the same embed code as seen in WordPress.)