Instructional Technology Services: Getting Started

Creation of Course Sites | Understanding How Courses Are Named | Making Your Course Available to Students | Population of Courses | Adding or Removing Users

Creation of Course Sites

Once a course is created in Banner, a course site automatically will appear in the SPU Blackboard system the following morning.

Understanding How Courses Are Named

The following naming convention is used to identify courses:
quarter status, academic year & quarter, CRN, name of course

Quarter status is identified by the following:
     C = Current quarter
     F = Future quarter
     P = Past quarter
     Z or no letter = The course existed in Online Learning prior to June 2004

     or is not tied to a specific course in Banner

This naming convention is used so that courses are sorted by term on the screen.
When reading the academic year and quarter, the first 5 digits represent the academic year. For example, 20067 represents the 2006-2007 academic year. The number following the academic year represents the quarter:
      1 = Fall
      2 = Winter
      3 = Spring
      4 = Summer

screen capture of of course name in blackboard

Making Your Course Available to Students

When you are ready to have students view your course:

Log into your course site.
Click the Control Panel
Under Course Options, click Settings
Click Course Availability
Click Yes
Click Submit

Population of Courses

Once a student registers for a course in Banner, they automatically will be listed in the course site the following morning.

Please note: Students will not be able to see a course site until you choose to make the course available via the Control Panel.
Cross-listed courses: Students enrolled in cross-listed courses will appear in the same course site.
Multiple sections of same course: If you teach multiple sections of a course, separate course sites will be created. If you plan to use the same content in multiple sections, we recommend placing documents in one site and then copying them over to the other site(s). We don’t recommend that students manually be placed into the same site as that defeats the automated population process.

Adding or Removing Users

WARNING: Please do not manually add instructors or students to or remove instructors or students from your course. Doing so will cause that person’s account to be disabled for that site. Instead, if an instructor or student needs to be added to a course site, please work with Student Academic Services to add that person to the course in Banner first. You may still manually add people to a course site as a TA,if desired.