As a Programme Administrator you can be granted a Blackboard system admin role, at either School or Department level, which allows you to search for, view, and enrol yourself onto any courses and organisations in that School or Department. The same role is suitable for Senior Programme Administrators, Programmes Managers and Support Centre Managers.
This role is granted separately from the Grades Approval role, although in practice SPAs and PAs will normally require this as well.
Accessing courses
Once you have been granted the Programme Administrator role in Blackboard you will see the Admin option on the Blackboard Menu. Navigate to this tab and click on Courses.
Once assigned the role, you will see the Admin option on the Blackboard Menu. Navigate to this tab, then click on Courses.
You can search for any course in your School / Department, by course name or module / programme code.
- Search by Course ID or Course Name.
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. - Select Contains / Equal to / Starts with
- Enter the search term
- To narrow the search results, you may find it helpful to search for courses created After a certain date
e.g. to find 2024/25 courses search for courses created after 1st April 2024 - Search results are sorted by Course ID. You can click on any of the column headings to reorder the results.
 indicates that the course is Unavailable to students.
 indicates that this is a Child course. The Parent course is indicated immediately above.
 indicates a course which has been disabled – normally this indicates either a very old course, or that the course was created in error.
Simply click on the highlighted Course ID to access the course itself – you will be able to see most course content without being enrolled.
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.
From here you can use the Enrol Users button to enrol yourself on the course.
However the easiest way is to search for the course you need, then simply click on the highlighted Course ID.
This takes you into the course. To enrol yourself
- go to Class register on the left hand side of the screen
- Click on the plus icon in the top right hand of the Class Register screen.
- The Enrol People panel will appear.
- Enter your name or username in the search box
- Click on the + sign and select the desired role from the dropdown list. We recommend that you enrol yourself as Teaching Assistant – that way you will not appear in the Course Staff list that is visible to students.
- Press Save.
You can enrol other colleagues in the same way, assigning the appropriate course role.
Managing course users
From the Course Register screen you can
- enrol yourself on any course in your School or Department
- enrol colleagues on the course and assign them the appropriate course role
- change
- the role of staff already enrolled on the course
- enrol students onto the course – although there are very few occasions where this is necessary, as nearly all student enrolments are pulled through from RISIS.
- set a user’s enrolment as unavailable (untick ‘Allow access to course’)
- remove staff users from the course – but note
- you cannot remove the Module Convenor, as they will have been enrolled automatically from RISIS
- if you are enrolled as Teaching Assistant, you need to demote instructors to a lesser role before you can remove them.
You cannot
- remove students whose Blackboard enrolment is pulled from RISIS (i.e. the vast majority of student enrolments)
New staff and changes of role
SPAs / Programmes Managers
- If you have a new member of staff joining your team, please log a ticket to request the appropriate role for your new colleague.
- When colleagues change role within the Support Centre, please log a ticket so we can update their access in Blackboard.
Guide last updated on December 13, 2022
