Course rollover is the annual process whereby Blackboard courses from the current academic year are copied for use in the next academic year.
For 2016, there are two important changes:
- Courses will be copied in two batches, over the weekends of 30th – 31st July and 6th – 7th August.
Blackboard will be unavailable to users while this work is being carried out – exact times tbc. - We anticipate that Blackboard and Turnitin assignment submission points will not be copied forward to 2016-17 courses.
Please read on for further information on these changes.
What are the changes to course rollover in 2016? When will Blackboard be unavailable?
Course rollover will take place over two consecutive weekends:
- Standard courses that are scheduled in RISIS (the student management system) to run in 2016-17 will be rolled forward over the weekend of 30th – 31st July.
- Other courses (e.g. Shared and non-RISIS courses) will be rolled forward over the weekend of 6th – 7th August.
Please see our Course Rollover page for a definition of the different course types.
Benefits include:
- making the process and schedule more transparent to academics and support staff
- more efficient use of IT staff time.
We anticipate Blackboard will be unavailable for no longer than 24 hours on each occasion, but Blackboard should be considered “at risk” for the whole of each weekend i.e. 30th – 31st July, and 6th – 7th August.
More detailed information will be provided to users in due course, after further testing of the copy process by IT.
Why are we planning not to copy assignment submission points?
We plan to present staff with a blank slate as far as assessment is concerned, allowing staff to set up the submission points they require with the most appropriate settings. The reasons for this are:
- To ensure a consistent and reliable user experience for students and staff.
- When assignment submission points are copied from the previous year, they retain their original settings and dates. At the very least these need to be edited and updated. When this has not happened, it has caused confusion for students who try to submit to an outdated assignment.
- In many cases, the copied assignment submission points are redundant, so staff opt to delete these, and create new ones.
- With the evolving use of e-submission, e-marking and e-feedback (where you may even be changing from one e-submission tool to another) the benefits of having a copy of the previous year’s assignment submission points and settings are rapidly diminishing.
- We have seen a significant number of cases where reusing Turnitin assignments copied from the previous year’s course has led to serious technical issues.
Please note that Blackboard Tests will be copied, but not deployed to users – in other words you will need to take action to make them available to students.
Full details will be made available on this blog and via the bb-users list in due course.
What action is required?
We will send out an update in early June, with details of what – if anything – you need to do to ensure your course content is rolled forward for use in 2016-17. As a broad indication:
- Most Blackboard courses are linked directly to a single programme or module in RISIS, and these are rolled forward automatically with no action required. Your new course will be then be available from early August for you to update and develop.
- If your Blackboard course is not directly linked to a RISIS programme or module code (e.g. if you use a Shared Course or Non-RISIS course), you will need to submit a request to have a 2016-17 course created and to have it copied forward.
Please note: No action is required at this stage. Details of any actions you need to take will be made available here, and sent via the bb-users email list, in a few weeks’ time.