Say you are an instructor.  You want to use Blackboard and echo360 active learning or capture platform.  You have TA’s or Course Builders in Blackboard.

So, you set up a schedule of captures through your support people for your course.  You do want to publish these captures to Blackboard, so you also create this link (or maybe the support people do it for you.)  Now you and your students can click on the link in Blackboard ( for us it is a video link in the Content Area of Blackboard course…) and see all the captures. The instructor also sees a dashboard of interesting analytics and has increased possible functionality.

But here is the crappy part: TA’s and Course Builders get Instructor roles in echo360.org.

So – that neat feature where Instructors would actually have a button in their account that allows them to add an ad hoc capture on their own?  That has to be turned off.  When you use this feature one can book a recording in any room that has an echo appliance… not just the one that you class actually occurs in. Can’t have students just recording content from any place they want.  Sometimes grand rounds even happen in these rooms.. whoops HIPAA violation!

I like to allow Instructors to delete their own content.  Nope.  Turn that off.

Let instructors make copies of their content?  Nope.

Well… maybe the primary instructor for a course could just go in a demote students that have instructor roles in echo360 back to students?  Nope, instructors can only add more instructors. (I actually tried this as an admin… and yes, I can demote an instructor – theoretically to student.  Only when you actually do this, it doesn’t make them a student at all… it removes them entirely.  Don’t worry though, as soon as that TA goes back into Blackboard again and clicks through to echo360, they will be back in the course again — AS AN INSTRUCTOR.)