School administrators

Blackboard courses created by SITS are attached to Blackboard’s Institutional Hierarchy.

This allows school administrators to have access to all of their school’s taught modules on Blackboard, view content within, and quickly enrol themselves if they need to (eg to create assignments, post announcements etc).

Search for a course

  1. When logged into Blackboard with your staff account, click Admin
  2. On the Administrator Panel, click Courses
  3. Select the type of information to search:
    • Course ID – For taught modules this is the academic year, then an underscore, then the module code.
    • Course Name – Contains the year, module code, and module title.
    • Instructor – search by an instructor’s username
  4. Select a search contition
    • Contains
    • Equal To
    • Starts With
    • Not Blank – shows you all courses you’re allowed to see
  5. Enter the text to search for, eg a module code or a username
  6. If required, choose to search for courses created before or after a certain date (see the tips below, for a quicker way to search for a module in an academic year)
  7. Click Go
  8. Your results are displayed underneath the search options.
    • A  in the Status column shows that a course isn’t available to students.
    • You can sort the list by clicking on the column headings.
    • Click the Course ID to enter the course

 

If you require access to a Blackboard course and you can’t find it, email telsupport@aston.ac.uk.

Enrol on a course

  1. Having found the course and clicked on the course ID, you will need to enrol yourself onto it.
  2. You will see a message saying there are no available items in the course. Click the  button located at the bottom of the course menu.
  3. When you agree to the confirmation, you will be enrolled on the course as an instructor.

Tips

Email announcements

When enrolled on the course, you will receive announcements sent as emails by the instructor(s). You can create a rule in Outlook to reduce the noise – either move them to a folder (so you can scan through them at a later date), or automatically mark them as read.

Emails sent by Blackboard are sent from do-not-reply@blackboard.com

Search for a module from a specific academic year

Search Course ID so that it Starts with the four digit academic year then an underscore, then the module code

Find a course if you don’t know the module code, but know (part of) the name

Search the Course Name for something that Contains the name of the module.

If you don’t know the exact name of the module, search for a key word. This should be enough to narrow down the search results

See a list of your school’s courses that haven’t been made available yet

Search Course ID so that it Starts with the current academic year followed by an underscore [1], eg

2017_

Then click on the Status heading on the table of results [2] so that it displays the results in ascending order.