It is about this time of year that our faculty’s minds turn to thoughts of… copying their course content into their upcoming course!
The following is a quick guide to the process which includes a couple of the known “gotchas” that we have found.
Copy Content From Another Course
Overview
The ‘Copy content from another course’ feature allows you to quickly copy the content from one of your pre-existing Blackboard courses without the old student information and place it in your new course.
List prerequisites, notes and warnings
This option is only available if you have a pre-existing course already in Blackboard AND for which you were a designer.
Step by step
- From the myPlymouth portal, click on the Blackboard Course List link on the myCourses tab.
- Find the course that you wish to copy and write down its complete name (ie. BU-3420-01 2)
- Now, click the course that you wish to copy the content into
- Select the option to ‘Copy content from another course’ button from the list of choices
- Click Continue
- Choose the appropriate course based on the name you wrote down above
- Blackboard will now copy the content into the new course
Known Problems
There is a known bug for anyone using the Groups tool. All groups must be deleted BEFORE you can successfully copy your course content. Once the content has been copied, you may then rebuild your groups and any selective release criteria that you may have set.
Temporary Workaround
My temporary workaround for this bug is to first document all of the groups and any learning component that utilizes selective release in conjunction with those groups. Then, remove all of the selective release criteria for each learning component, delete all of the groups and any associated sign-up sheet(s). At this point, you should be able to successfully copy the content to the new course and then you can start the process of rebuilding any sign-up sheets and/or groups and then reassign the associated selective release criteria to all of the earlier identified learning components.
For more helpful Blackboard tips, check out the Help button in the myPlymouth portal and click on the Blackboard link!
