I’m Daniel Collins of the CUNY/Kingsborough Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. In our department, we have of course been working with digital and online environments since the inception of our CS program, and a number of our faculty have been at the forefront of distance learning for many years. Some of our instructors have been using the Blackboard learning management system for a few decades (myself: 20 years and counting), and we’d like to share our knowledge and expertise with you.
In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic, which required CUNY to shift all courses to distance learning on an emergency basis, forced all faculty to pick up online teaching via Blackboard in just a few days in the spring of 2020. Some of us found ourselves suddenly producing tutorials, videos, documents, and consulting to support that effort, and we hope that you’ll find them useful as well. See below for the resources that we’ve developed.
Executive Overviews
Here you’ll find brief slideshow PDFs, providing a “crash course” overview of various major topics on Blackboard.
Video Walkthroughs
Below you can see detailed video walkthroughs for important tools in our teaching of mathematics and computer science at CUNY, using Blackboard (and most are applicable to other courses as well). See above for brief overviews of many of these topics.
- Grade Center
- Assignments
- Test Creation
- Test Deployment
- Test Submission and Grading
- Test Import from Pearson Testgen
- Course Copy
- Course Merge Tool
- Date Management
- My Courses Cleanup
- Menu Item Deletion
- Collaborate Encoding and Transmission
- Accessing “My Grades” Feedback
Best Practices
Documents outlining suggested best practices for using different tools go here.
Student Handouts
Here are a few handouts that some of us provide to students to help navigate certain corners of the Blackboard interface.
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
