User Management

I want to add a Teaching Assistant (TA) to my course site
I want to give another instructor access to my course site
A student dropped out of my class. How do I remove them from my Blackboard course site?
I'd like to create student groups - how do I do this?
Course roles in Blackboard

I want to add a Teaching Assistant (TA) to my course site

Please submit a Help Desk ticket advising the following:

First and last name of TA or adjunct to be added
Indicate the course using the FULL COURSE ID (e.g., COUR.101..01.2011.20). Requests without the full course ID will not be fulfilled.
What role you want them to be designated within the course site. See Course roles for clarification.

Please note that the person to be added as a TA must have an active USF network profile and therefore a network username and password.

I want to give another instructor access to my course site

Instructors are automatically added to course sites based on the information contained in the Registrar's database, Jenzabar. If, however, you wish for a colleague to have access to the course for observing or grading purposes, please issue a Help Desk ticket following the steps indicated above for adding a TA. In Jenzabar, courses can only have one instsructor of record. Apart from a written request from the Department Head/Chair, it is ONLY the Registrar-assigned instructor to any given course that has the authority to request additional instructors . You may not make a request to be added to someone else's course, even if it is a graduate student that is overseeing a course for you. If the Registrar has assigned that graudate assistant as the instructor of the course, he/she must make the written request for any changes to the course, including course combinations.

A student dropped out of my class. How do I remove them from my Blackboard course site?

You don't. Even though you can find ways to delete students, this is something that the Jenzabar Snapshot process does, checking Bb automatically, on a daily basis against the official roster and paperwork. If you delete a student that hasn't been officially removed from Jenzabar, you will find that Jenzabar will repopulate this student in your course the following day. In addition, the moment you delete a student from your course you remove all work the student uploaded, as well as their existence in Grade Center. If the student has a change of heart before the offical paperwork goes through, you will have lost all record of that student's work up to that point. Even if the student informs you of the desire to drop the class, he/she may wait too long and it then becomes an issue of having to give a grade of "Withdraw Failing". If you've deleted the student from your course, you will have no record of the progress in the course and no proof of the failing grade. Your best option is to simply hide the student and let the Snapshot process do its job.

Many times, however, students drop the course without informing you, the instructor. The snapshot process runs, deleting the student and his/her grades from your course, but then you are asked to provide pass/fail information to the registrar. One solution to this is to periodically, download the grade center into an Excel spreadsheet by selecting Download from Work Offline. You can also always find student grades, whether they have been deleted or not, in the Grade History option under Reports. You will need to sort the list by student name and then manually calculate the grade, but you do still have access to the necessary information.

I'd like to create student groups - how do I do this?

Creating student groups can help your sort and manage large groups of students more effectively. Using groups is useful for emailing, discussion board and collaboration. To create student groups:

From the Control Panel click on ‘Groups' under the Users and Groups section.
Choose either to 'Create Single Group' or 'Create Group Set' (in a Group Set you will be able to name the set, e.g., Breakout, and then chose how many groups to create)
Choose either 'Self-Enroll", where the students will decide on the members of their groups, or 'Manual', where you will determine the group members.
Type a name for the group and, if desired, a description.
Check the ‘Tool Availability' that you wish to be available to the group (I recommend selecting all of them).
If you chose 'Manual' enroll, select membership for group/groups.
Click ‘Submit' and ‘OK'.
Rinse & Repeat as necessary.

Video Tutorial for Adding Groups to a Course

Course roles in Blackboard

Course roles are preset roles that determine the level of access a user has within a course. Users can have only one role per course. Roles are course-specific, so a single user could be in an instructor role in one course and a student in another course. There are six course roles (for our purposes, you only need to concern yourself with first three):

Instructor: The Instructor role has access to everything in the course Control Panel.
Teaching Assistant: About the only difference between the instructor role and the Teaching Assistant role is that the TA cannot remove the Instructor from the course (which, through our Snapshot is not an option, anyway). They have access to all the same controls as the Instructor.
Course Builder: The Course Builder role has access only to the Content Area section of the Control Panel. This access allows the individual to upload content, but does not give access to areas such as Grade Center and Performance Dashboard.
Grader: The Grader role only has access to Assessment tools and Collaboration sections but is not allowed to change content.
Student: The Student role is the default course role. Students do not have access to the Control Panel. We do not add students. Student enrollment is determined by Jenzabar.
Guest: The Guest role has no access to any areas in the Control Panel and limited access to the course site. Due to our security settings, Guest is not an option.