ITS Training Documentation

Did you make your course available to your students? All courses are created in Blackboard, but default to “unavailable” so that the instructor can determine if and when they might want to use Blackboard in their course.

Steps to make a course available:

Under CLASS MANAGEMENT (which is located in the column on the left side of an individual course page), expand the options for the Control Panel using the left options arrow.
Expand the option for "Customization."
Click the "Properties" link under the Customization option.
Under "Set Availability" (#3), click the "Yes" button for "Make Class Available".
Scroll to the top or bottom of the screen and click "Submit" to save your changes.
Note: These steps need to be made to each class you are teaching.

All of my courses aren't listed? (Problem with both faculty and students)

There is a bug in Blackboard 9 that affects some faculty and students.

Click on the Denison Courses tab near the top of the My Courses page to see all courses in which you are enrolled.

If you want your classes to be listed on the My Courses page, click the Add Module button located in the upper left corner of the screen. Choose Courses: Quick View and then click Submit. Another module will appear that contains all courses in which you are enrolled or teach.

I can't see any materials in my courses other than Announcements.

You may have inadvertently clicked the tab located on the left side of the content screen. Click on the tab and your buttons will reappear.

I sent an email using the Announcement tool and my students did not receive it.

We were experiencing some problems with the e-mail option in the Announcement module.

If you would like to send an e-mail of an Announcement, I suggest you copy and paste the message into the "Send Email" function within Blackboard.

I open a .pdf document in Blackboard and it just goes to a white screen.

There is a problem with viewing .pdf documents when using the Firefox 3 browser on a Windows computer. This problem does not occur in Internet Explorer. You can change a setting in Firefox 3 to correct this problem.

Open your Firefox browser.
Choose Tools in the menu bar
Choose Options
Click on the Applications icon in the middle of the screen.
A list will appear. Find Adobe Acrobat Document in the Content Type column and click on the down arrow in the Action column. Choose Use Adobe Reader 9.1 (or the version that you have on your computer).

I am trying to open a Word document and the screen is blank.

A Word document might also be blocked and you will be asked to allow files from that website (Blackboard) in order to view it. However, the message appears under the URL and is often overlooked. Choose “Click here for options” to open the file. You can choose save or open. If you choose open, you will be bounced back to the Announcement screen.

I have created an on-line assignment. When I go to retrieve the files in the Gradebook, I get an error message when I download them.

This problem occurs because you have used a special character (such as #, / -) in the name field of the assignment.
Go to your original assignment, choose Edit and remove the special character and click Submit.
Attempt to download the files now. If you still have a problem, make sure that the title of the assignment in the column of the Grade Book has no special characters.

FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions

Office 2007-2008 Assistance