Course Properties

Properties control the functional settings of your course. To access course properties, change Edit Mode to ON, and on the Control Panel, expand the Customization section and select Properties.

Provide a name and description

You can change the name and description of your course. This name appears as the displayed course name throughout Blackboard Learn. The description appears in the course catalog.

Use course classification

You can safely ignore these fields. Course classification is not part of or related to course categorization for the course catalog. When you create each course, a default classification value is listed. These fields were used in previous versions of Blackboard Learn, but exist now only to ensure backward compatibility with building blocks or other plug-ins.

Set course availability

You can set courses to be available or unavailable. If a course is available, all users participating in the course have access. If a course is unavailable, access is determined by course role. Instructors, course builders, teaching assistants (TAs), and graders can see and access unavailable courses from the My Courses tab and the course list, but they're marked as unavailable. Students can't access unavailable courses regardless of the course duration. Unavailable courses don't appear in the course catalog.

Set the course duration

Course duration defines the time in which students may interact with a course:

Continuous: The course is always available.
Select Dates: The course is available according to specific dates. Courses may have a start date, but no end date. The start and end times are set automatically in the local time of the course creator. If the course creator's local time is Eastern, the time is set by Eastern time. The course will start immediately and the end at 11:59:59. After the end date, courses are not available to students, but are otherwise unchanged.
Days from the Date of Enrollment: Place a time limit on courses calculated from the date a student enrolls. Use this option for self-paced courses.

Use terms to set availability and duration

If your institution has associated a term with a course—for example, Spring 2013 Semester or Winter Session 2013—you can set a course to use these preset dates.

When a term is available for a course, additional options appear with Set Availability and Set Course Duration:

Use Term Availability: The course is available during the term dates, but unavailable before and after. The name of the term is listed.
Use Term Duration: The course runs for the entire duration of the term, beginning on the first date of the term and ending on the last. The actual dates are listed for the associated term.

Categorize the course

The course catalog lists the courses that are offered through the system and is made available to users by your institution. The categories in the course catalog are also created and maintained by your institution. You can add your course to one or more categories that appear in the course catalog.

Select a catalog category and use the arrow functions to move the category to the Selected Items box. You can select more than one category. Repeat the process to add another category. The course appears under the selected categories. Invert Selection selects categories that aren't selected and clears categories that are selected. Use this to exclude one or two categories without having to select all the other categories.

Select a language pack

Language packs change the language of buttons, titles, and other text supplied by the system. Language pack preferences are defined at the system, course, and user level.

At the system level, your institution defines one language pack as the system default. This is the language pack that appears when no other language pack is specified at the course level or at the user level.

At the course level, you can set a language pack that is different from the default to make all users in a course view the same language pack. For example, change the language pack to match a course designed to teach that language.

At the user level, individuals may choose their preferred language packs, unless a language pack choice has been set to be enforced.

Customized names for content areas and tools aren't changed with the language pack. These values stay the same for all language packs. The default names in the system are translated and appear differently in each language pack.

Set course files options

These properties are available only if your institution has access to the content management features:

Course Files Default Directory: Type or browse for the directory to contain the files for this course. This directory is the default location where files are saved for the course and doesn't conflict with the Content Collection Home Page setting.
Display: Each item in the Content Collection has a menu that provides access to the available actions. When you work in the course files area on the Control Panel, the selected option configures the menu to display all of the Content Collection options that are available when you work in the Content Collection tab or only the course-specific options.