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Welcome to the Introduction to Blackboard 9.1 with Collaborate training course!
This course will prepare you to teach tech-enhanced,
hybrid and fully online courses here at Lake-Sumter State College.
We have seen significant increases in student
enrollment in online courses the past few semesters,
so your participation in this course is especially important as
it helps the college meet the needs of our students.
We appreciate you being here!
This course can feel intense,
especially for those who are new to the online learning environment.
This course does require a significant time commitment—around
three hours per week for the next 7 weeks.
Weeks 1 and 7 require the largest time commitment.
In these weeks, expect to spend 6 hours or more on course work.
The course has four main parts:
The orientation unit, which you are completing right now, a “setup” phase,
which you can complete either in person or fully online, depending on your preference,
a synchronous, online meeting where you will learn to use
our Collaborate Web conferencing tool,
and asynchrous weekly assignments,
where you will read and watch tutorials about
the Blackboard learning environment,
participate in discussions and peer reviews,
and complete assignments that will lead you through building
the first week of your brand new online or hybrid course.
This may sound complicated, but don’t worry—we’ve outlined
the entire process in your course syllabus,
which is located in the menu on the left,
under the link that says “Syllabus and Policies.”
At the end of the syllabus, you will find a course calendar that shows due dates,
meeting dates and other important information.
Our best students print this calendar and
use them to ensure all course requirements are met.
Pay close attention to due dates.
Meeting deadlines is vital to your successful completion of this course!
Navigating this course is easy, thanks to
the principles of predictable instructional design.
Predictable design starts with the course menu, located on your left.
The first link in the menu is your course “Home” page.
This is the first thing you see when you log into this course.
Information about your instructors and the course appears on this page,
as well as a direct link to the current week’s content.
In the “Course Content” link, you will find your weekly assignments.
Each week has an overview, which contains the weekly objectives,
an assignments list, “Lectures and Resources” folder,
“Discussions” folder, and “Submit Assignments” folder.
Make sure you complete everything on the assignments list each week.
This is how you ensure you have completed all of the weekly requirements.
In the “Course Documents” link,
you will find course building resources
and the entire reading list
for the course, organized by category.
Don’t worry—all of the reading assignments are
linked from the week where they are needed.
You don’t need to read everything all at once.
Your course is organized so that no assignments are due on the weekends.
This is so you may use the weekends to read the instructional
materials and work on your assignments.
Almost every week has two
discussion questions for you to answer.
These questions require an initial reply to the question,
plus two replies to your peers.
All replies must be completed by Tuesday at noon.
Most weeks also have tests.
Questions on the tests are multiple-choice, true-false and fill-in-the-blank,
and cover material from the week’s readings.
Tests are due each Tuesday by noon.
Your instructors welcome all of your questions,
but ask that you please ask them on the Q&A Discussion Board so
all students can benefit from the answers.
Besides your instructors, you also have other resources for help.
The "Student Help" link on your course menu leads to
Blackboard's full instructions on using tools within
the learning environment from the student point-of-view.
To search for instructions, enter the topic with which you need help and click "enter."
On the left of the screen is the table of contents for
the entire student manual for Blackboard!!
The "Instructor Help" link is equally useful--but from the Instructor point-of-view.
You can search it the same way as the student help,
and the full table of contents on the left is for the instructor manual for Blackboard.
So, now that you have an idea how the course works,
what should you do now? Finish orientation, of course!
Week 1’s materials will open under Course Content after you complete the orientation.
Weeks 2-7 will open after you complete Week 1’s assignments.
Good luck with the course! We look forward to working with you.