Credit-Bearing Academic Courses
Most academic courses listed in UR Student or MedSIS are automatically created in Blackboard based on feeds from those student systems.
Certain types of courses are not automatically created: course sections listed as workshops, recitations, laboratory, as well as those that are typically seminar and independent study (courses with a 9 in the middle of the three digit code). Instructors can request that these courses be added to Blackboard through their Blackboard support team.
Courses that are co-located in UR Student will automatically be merged in Blackboard. The resulting course will be what is listed as “parent” in CDCS (https://cdcs.ur.rochester.edu/). The Blackboard team has no way to change the parent designation.
Instructors wishing to merge other courses into one can make a request through their Blackboard support team. Please specify what course you would like to have as the “main” course. This is the one that all enrollments will be merged into and into which you will make all your Blackboard course updates.
Note: Course merge requests are being processed differently starting with Spring 2021. This is in order to make accommodations for the collection of assessment data in the future. All sections of the course will still appear in your UR Courses Online module on Blackboard. One of these is considered the main/master course. If you were to enter any of the courses other than the main course, you will see this message: Unavailable child course: Students will not see changes made to this course. Please work in master course. You will be unable to make any updates in this course. Please only make the main course available to students. Students enrolled in sections other than the main will also see the course in which they are registered listed as well as the main course. As long as you don’t make it available and you tell them that they should use main section instead, everything should work fine.
Other Academic Uses
Blackboard can be used for other academic-related “courses” that are not in the Student Systems, as long as the main population is University of Rochester users.
Please consult with your Blackboard support team regarding requests for a Blackboard course that is outside the typical credit-bearing course list.
Non-Academic Uses
Blackboard Organizations can be used for groups that want to be able to use the features of Blackboard with a particular group of University of Rochester users.
Blackboard Organizations have the same features as Blackboard courses, however are not associated with a term. Instructor roles are labeled as Leaders and Student roles are labeled as Participants.
Enrollment into an Organization is manual, or can be set for self-enrollment (which means that anyone with a Blackboard account could potentially search for and enroll themselves in your organization).
Please consult with your Blackboard support team regarding requests for a Blackboard Organization.