Course related information should be kept in your course.  Students often get too much email and your communications can easily be lost in their inboxes.  Use course announcements to update students, remind them of deadlines and keep them engaged in your course space.

See these instructions for creating an announcement.

Blackboard automatically provides a class-wide blog available to all students (you can make the class-wide blog available through the Course Tools link in the Control Panel). In addition, you can create a blog space specific to particular assignments by adding a blog to any content area or group space.

Based on blog settings, you can assign a group blog, allowing a specific group to discuss group assignments.  Individual blogs are also available and allow private dialog between a student and the instructor. In a private journal, student can see his or her own entries, along with any instructor comments while instructors can view journal entries of all students.

See the section on Blackboard blogs for more information.

If you participated in an Elluminate session and it was recorded, you can access it through your Blackboard course site. Recordings become available within 24 hours.

See these instructions for retrieving a recorded Elluminate session or find out more about Elluminate.

Content areas are the “buckets” that hold all the material for your course. Buttons with the name of each content area are found in the left-hand navigation bar of your course site. In Blackboard, you can choose to “turn off” or hide these buttons by making them unavailable.

This option is useful when:

• The semester is under way, but you want to hide a portion of your course because you are still working on it
• You want to keep teaching materials—only visible to you or your co-teachers—inside the course space
• Your course space was created with a content area that you do not plan to use

To hide a content area, start in the Control Panel and find Course Options. Choose Settings and then Availability. Click Disable to the right of the areas you want to turn off. Click Submit, then OK. Your new menu will be visible immediately.

By default, all Blackboard course sites are unavailable (hidden from students) while you prepare your course. To make a course available, go to the Control Panel, find Course Settings and then choose Course Availability. Select Yes to the question "Do you want to make this course available to users?"

Press Ctrl - Z (Command - Z on a Mac) to undo your last action.

So much of the Babson curriculum is based on group work.  It is critical to provide students with space in your Blackboard course, so they can hash out their final answers together – before submitting.  You can also add collaboration tools like wikis, blogs, and discussion boards to group spaces and allow students to decide which tool works best for them. See these instructions for creating group spaces inside your Blackboard course.

Adobe Presenter, formerly called Macromedia Breeze, allows you to turn PowerPoint slide shows into dynamic online presentations, complete with streaming audio, video, and interactive tools. This software package is a $500 retail value but can be downloaded free from the Babson Portal.

See the Presenter section of our website for more information.

An entire course can be copied from semester to semester.  Request a course copy by including the original course ID as well as the destination course ID in an an email to support@babson.edu.

Blended learning is a teaching method that consists of a combination of face-to-face class instruction, asynchronous sessions (where participants need not be online at the same time, as in a discussion board forum), and synchronous (real-time) video, audio, or text-based sessions live over the web. Babson's Fast Track MBA is a blended learning program.

In Microsoft Office, you can copy the formatting from one selection of text to another with the Format Painter.

1. Select the text with the formatting you want to copy.
2. Click the Home tab.
3. Click Format Painter  in the Clipboard group.
4. Select the text you want to apply the formatting to.