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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:
| Factors for Comparison | Master Course Shell (Development Site) | Official Course Site (Teaching Site) |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Initial course development, plus continual improvement and storage of course content for multiple semesters. | Teaching, for a single semester. |
| Source | Created for you, one time, by eCampus Center during the eCampus Course Design & Development Seminar | Created by Boise State’s Help Deskonly after you, the instructor, request it each semester. (See instructions here) using LMS Middleware. |
| Enrollees | You (the course developer) and one or more Instructional Design Consultants (never students!) | You (the instructor) and the students for that semester |
| Usage | Your semester-neutral master course stays intact (unless you add to it) so that you can reuse it for multiple sections and future semesters. | After you’ve requested your teaching shell for a particular semester and it has been created for you, you copy your content from your master course to your teaching shell, tweak your syllabus and calendar, edit the dates on your assignments, add students to groups, etc. When you’ve got it the way you want it, you make this teaching shell (which is technically no longer a shell but a full-blown course site!) avaiilable to students. |
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 instructio