Manage Courses

When you create a course, Blackboard Learn requires only two course properties: a course name and a course ID. However, several other course properties control important aspects of courses, such as when they're available.

You can edit course properties and add settings that weren't included when the courses were created.

You can also merge courses. Those courses become child courses in a larger course set, appearing in the course listing under the master course. Child courses are marked as unavailable and must remain that way, but you can manage them in the master course. Active courses—courses with student submissions—should never be made into a child course of a merge course relationship.

View or edit course properties

Child courses have limited options in the menu and need to be managed from their associated master courses.

On the Administrator Panel in the Courses section, select Courses.
Search for a course.
On the Courses page, open a course's menu and select Edit.
Edit the course properties. You can't change the course ID.
Select Submit.

Change course availability

In the course search results, Blackboard indicates unavailable courses with a red circle with a white X. To change a course's availability, open the course's menu and select Make Available or Make Unavailable. You can also check multiple courses and use the same option in the Availability menu at the top or bottom of the search results.

Instructors, administrators, and other users with the role capability Treat Users with this Role like Instructor (P) or the privilege Course/Organization > Access unavailable course can enter a course that is unavailable. You can use this to let these users set up courses before making them available to students. Students with non-disabled, available enrollments will see the course card or name in their course list, but they can't enter it.

Admin panel displaying examples of different course availability states

Enable or disable courses

Blackboard supports a second record status which is used mainly with SIS Integrations: Enabled or Disabled. When a course is disabled nobody can enter it and the course is not listed in most lists of courses, except to Administrators. You can use this state to indicate that a course is cancelled or never began.

Blackboard indicates a disabled course with the prohibition sign: "🚫."

When preparing to delete courses in bulk due to data retention policies, it is best to set the courses to be deleted to the disabled status for some time and wait and see if anyone complains. This grants greater assurance that the courses really are ready to be deleted.

To enable or disable a course you can use the SIS Integration to alter the row_status to enabled or disabled.

Manually changing this data is possible, but the best practice is to use the SIS as 'source of truth,' and rely on the SIS data feed to control this data, as this will prevent conflicts. However, this can be manually changed by using the Data state management tools.

Mark a course as complete

At this time, the Complete Course option is only available for the Ultra Course View. Only instructors can set a course to complete from the Courses page. Administrators can control course availability from the Administrator Panel, but can't mark a course as complete in this area.

On the Courses page, instructors can control availability for the courses that they teach. Point to a course card and select the lock icon to change a course's availability. You can also change course availability on the Course Content page. When you change the availability of an open course, you can either make the course private or complete the course.

A complete course is in a read-only state. Enrolled students can open the course and access the course content as normal, but are not able to interact in the course, such as participate in discussions or submit assignments. A private course appears on an enrolled student's Courses page, but students are unable to open the course or access content.

When a course is complete, the instructor can change the course's availability back to private or open. The Complete Course option isn't tied to the course's term.

Enable or disable course structures

Course structures are available only in the Original Course View at this time.

Course structures contain predefined course materials such as Original Course View course menu links, instructions, and content examples that help instructors jump-start their Original Course View organization. Administrators control the availability of this feature.

Enable or disable the Quick Setup Guide

The Quick Setup Guide is available only in the Original Course View at this time.

The Quick Setup Guide helps instructors choose elements for their courses such as a course structure. They can also edit the course name and description, and access topics and video tutorials to help them learn more about building their courses.

You can choose whether or not the Quick Setup Guide appears when instructors enter their courses. If you choose to disable its appearance, instructors can access it from the Original Course View Control Panel > Customization > Quick Setup Guide.

On the Administrator Panel in the Courses section, select Course Settings.
On the Course Settings page, select Quick Setup Guide.
On the Quick Setup Guide page, select the check box for Do not show the Quick Setup Guide when entering a course to disable it. To enable it, clear the check box.
Select Submit.

Bulk delete course materials

You may find it most useful to bulk delete course materials at the end of a course. You can select the materials you want to delete and keep the rest for use in the future. For example, you can delete students and grades from a course, but keep the content.

You can't recover materials you choose to bulk delete.

If you choose to bulk delete "Users," all users with the role of Student are removed from your course. The roles of Teaching Assistant, Grader, and Course Builders aren't removed.

Archive a course first so that you can restore to its exact state before a bulk delete.

Bulk delete process

Control Panel > Packages and Utilities > Bulk Delete

In the Select Content Materials to Delete section, select the check boxes for the content areas in the course that you want to delete.
In the Select Other Materials to Delete section, select the check boxes for content found in other areas of the course that you want to delete. For example, if you select Contacts, all of the data associated with staff information will be deleted.
In the Confirmation section, type "Delete" in the box to confirm the bulk delete.
Select Submit.

Delete courses

When you delete a course, Blackboard Learn automatically creates a final, complete archive package. The archive package is stored in the course's autoArchive folder of the Content Collection under the following filename pattern: Course_ID_Course_PKID_Course_Title_currentTime_in_milliseconds_bb_permanent.zip.

Archives created automatically by course deletion are available for 30 days. This can be helpful for recovering data from courses deleted accidentally.

Learn more about automatic archives