As a Programme Administrator you will be added to the your school or department at a system level in Blackboard. This system hierarchy provides you access to your schools courses via the Administrator Panel.
- New staff access
- Open the Admin Panel
- Find courses
- Open course (you will have restricted access unless enrolled on the course)
- Enrol yourself or others on a course
- Look up users
New staff and changes of role
SPAs / Programmes Managers
- For new members of staff joining your team, please log a ticket to request access to the appropriate departments for your new colleague.
- When colleagues change role within the Support Centre, please log a ticket so we can update their access in Blackboard.
To allow staff access to the Grades Approval and Transfer function on your courses they will also require the Grades Approval role, this can also be requested by raising a ticket on the DTS helpdesk.
Open the Administrator Panel
Once you have been added to your school hierarchy in Blackboard you will see the Admin option on the Blackboard Menu.
Finding a course
Once in the Administrator Panel click on Courses. Use the search function to locate your course.
- Search by Course ID or Course Name (a).
- Select Contains / Equal to / Starts with (b).
- Enter the search term – Truncation is applied automatically
e.g. ‘cognit’ will return hits for courses containing ‘cognition’ and ‘cognitive’; ‘PY2TA’ will return results also for PY2TA1, PY2TA2 etc. - To narrow the search results, you may find it helpful to search for courses created After a certain date (d).
Course list:
- Search results are sorted by Course ID. You can click on any of the column headings to reorder the results (e).
- Red x icon indicates the course is Unavailable to students (f).
- Red arrow icon Indicates that this is a Child course (g). The Parent course is indicated immediately above.
- Red circle with a line through it icon indicates a course which has been disabled (h) – normally this indicates either a very old course, or that the course was created in error
Open a course
Simply click on the highlighted Course ID to access the course itself.
- Make sure you open the parent course.
- If you open a child course in error a warning banner will appear
- The banner will say “Unavailable child course: Students will not see changes made to this course. Please work in parent course”.
- If you open a child course in error a warning banner will appear
- Once the course has opened you will need to enrol yourself as a Teaching Assistant to access the Gradebook or make any most changes.
Enrol yourself and others on the course
You can use the contextual menu, then Enrolments to view all staff and students enrolled on the course.
The Enrolments screen for the course will list all users enrolled on the course. Here you can use the Enrol Users button to enrol yourself on the course.
In the Add Enrolments screen:
- Add username of yourself and/or others
- Select the role (note some roles are no longer in use)
- Submit
Alternatively, you can open the course and enrol yourself and others via the course register, see our guide Manage and enrol users for more details.
Look up users
You can use the Users function to look up any staff or students in your school and check which courses they are enrolled on.
Once in the Administrator Panel click on Users.
- It is possible to search for staff or students by
- Username
- First name
- Student ID
- The users details, such as availability on Blackboard are provided
- The contextual menu for the user gives further details on Course or Organisation enrolments
Guide last updated on June 5, 2025