30
With all of your design documents completed, you are just about ready to begin hands-on course development. Here, we explain the use of a special kind of site in Blackboard for building your course.
Using a Master Course Shell
Since the majority of eCampus courses at Boise State are offered through the Blackboard course management system, it stands to reason that you will need a site in order to build your course. A course shell is simply the framework in Blackboard for holding the content, assignments, and so on of a particular course. For our purposes here, we will explain two types of course shells in use:
INSERT TABLE
Think of a Master as a repository/update space for your course that never goes away. By the end of this seminar (or shortly thereafter), when you have finished building the development site and you have requested an Official teaching shell from OIT, you will be able to copy the instructional materials from the Master course into the Official teaching shell. Copying from the eCampus Master course that has never had students in it to a new teaching course will save you time and effort!
Another possible use of a Master is to build a single Master course, then copy it into multiple Official teaching sections to ensure that all students taking that course have the same objectives, content, and assessments. If you teach a course with multiple sections, feel free to bring up the idea of a Master course with your department chair. Click the image below to review the course lifecycle.
Using Templated Learning Activities and Assessment Directions
Speaking of saving you time, you will see in your Master a course menu much like what we have in this seminar. In addition, your instructional design consultant will help you develop a sequence of modules similar to what you’ve experienced in this seminar. The eCampus Center instructional design team has developed a number of templated learning activities and assessment directions for online courses. These templated activities and assessments will help you address quite a few of the Quality Matters Standards without lifting a finger, specifically those related to your Course Overview and Introduction (General Standard 1) and to Learner Support (General Standard 7). Your instructional design consultant will help you select the templates that will be of most use to you and copy them into your course for your use.
Building Text in Blackboard
Before you begin developing your course in Blackboard, it is important for you to know a few little tricks that many people use to cut down on the amount of time they spend cleaning up text formatting issues.
Avoiding Lost Work due to Network Issues
To protect against losing work if an Internet connection loss or software error occurs, we suggest you type content in a simple offline text editor, such as Notepad or TextEdit, then copy-and-paste your complete draft into Blackboard Learn. Copying and pasting from full-featured word processing programs such as Mi