Course Structure Tools
- Sandy Mustico
- Matthew Warne
- Sturdy Knight
Course Structure Tools
Blackboard Ultra features a single, central course content area. This page offers guidance on how to use modules, folders, documents, and other Ultra features to organize course content in ways that align with the needs of your curriculum and make it easier to share information with students through Blackboard.
Table of Contents
With the modern look and simple functionality of the Ultra Course View in Blackboard, instructors will find it easy to build their Ultra courses. The Ultra course layout is based on contemporary web design practices that meet current accessibility guidelines and responsiveness across all device sizes. This creates a consistent and seamless experience for faculty and students alike when moving between a desktop, tablet and mobile device.
In the Original Course View (OCV) you have a menu where you can customize multiple content areas. In the Ultra Course View (UCV), you get one main level content area, which means that you will be required to condense your menus into some combination of modules or folders.
Because there are some features that exist in original courses, that are either not available or will not be enabled in the ultra course, performing a course copy of your entire original course content to populate your ultra course will result in broken and unconverted content. It will be difficult and time consuming to find broken/not converted items and remediate them than it would be to build the course from scratch. A combination of copying individual items from original courses, piecemeal, and building new content within your ultra course is ideal. Copying items into your Ultra course has been simplified and instructions on how to do so can be found here. If you want to start adding content to your course without copying previous content, you can follow instructions found here. Once your course is built in the Ultra Course View, copying an entire course and its content between Ultra courses is seamless.
Below are a few examples of Ultra Course designs that might help you to re-imagine your course design.
Modules
Why use modules?
Use modules when you want to control the flow of the content of the course. Modules allows you to enforce a sequence. Students must complete prerequisite items before moving onto the next item, ensuring that students obtain information systematically. You can organize all course materials into modules using a unit of your choosing, such as days, weeks, chapters or topics. Each module can be populated with files, discussions, assignments, exams and other learning materials, with the knowledge that you have control over the release and access of content. If you do not want to enforce a sequence, modules are a good choice if you would like students to access content using the built in navigation tools of the module. This allows students to move back and forth between materials within a module without having to exit out of the module.
Use Modules to:
Create prerequisite activities that students must complete before moving to the next item in the course.
Track student progress through a sequence of learning activities.
Organize course content by units such as days, weeks, topics or chapters.
Customize modules with images for visual appeal and to help students quickly identify the appropriate module.
Benefits:
Learning module content is presented sequentially thus enforcing sequential viewing of the items they contain.
Students can move through the content of a module without navigating to other parts of the course.
Modules are easily recognized by their gray shading.
If you use images, the images can be used to help students quickly identify each module.
Limitations:
A folder can be added to modules, but modules cannot be placed inside of a folder. All modules must live at the top navigation level of the course.
Ultra course view only allows a nesting folder depth of three. If you are adding a folder to a module, the module counts toward a folder depth.
For a more detailed example of a course design using modules, click here.
