Continuing Instruction with Blackboard

To preserve academic continuity, faculty are encouraged to use Blackboard. To request a new Blackboard Course please click here. You can access your previously established Blackboard courses at University of Richmond Blackboard.

Communicating with Students

Email

If you use Blackboard, you can email your classes by using the new Qwickly tools below your course listing on the main Blackboard page.

Online Discussion

Blackboard offers several tools to help you organize online topics for discussion, including the Discussion Board which allows you to:

• Place each discussion topic in its own individual forum and manage student responses to the posed topic.
• Grade each student individually without having to search through each individually posted discussion.

For help using the Blackboard discussion boards, please consult the following resources:

• Creating and managing discussions.
• Grading discussions.

Delivering Course Content

If you have your lecture materials written or otherwise recorded, then you just need to make them available by uploading them to your Blackboard course.

Blackboard offers an additional tool, Panopto, which allows professors to:

• Record lectures, demonstrations or instructions for students from their own computers
• Use their computers at home or at their office to record content and upload it to Blackboard for their students to view
• Use classrooms equipped with cameras and microphones to record lectures in a classroom setting.
• Record your computer screen, your voice, and your webcam.
• Post your recording for your students to view in Blackboard.

Panopto Guides for Instructors

• View resources on SpiderTechNet.
• Additionally, Panopto offers documentation on using the system on their website, as well as video tutorials.

Encouraging Student Participation

One of the typical classroom activities is encouraging students’ participation in learning, such as asking them to answer your questions, discussing topics with other students and performing group activities.

To encourage student participation via Blackboard, you may use tools like Discussion Boards, Wikis, and Glossary.

To facilitate participatory activities, you may create Groups in Blackboard and ask students to do group work.

Administering Assignments, Tests, and Grades

In Blackboard you can administer assignments, test, and grades. Through Blackboard you can:

• Announce assignments to your class.
• Collect assignments from students.
• Grade and provide feedback.
• Create quizzes and tests to be graded either manually or automatically.

If you need additional information on how to use these features in Blackboard, please refer to: on using Blackboard for assignments and assessments, please consult the following links:

• Creating assignments.
• Best practices for using online assessments.
• Create new Blackboard quiz/test.
• Creating multiple choice questions.
• Creating essay or short answer questions.
• Setting test availability and deploying the quiz or test.

For safe keeping of grades, we recommend that you backup all grades stored in Blackboard by downloading them into an Excel spreadsheet.