Course settings determine course list placement.

The term or duration setting for a course determines if a course appears in the current, past, or upcoming course list. This property may not be visible to users of all roles.

Course term or duration

Courses have one of the following duration settings.

Continuous

  • No start date or end date for the course.

  • If a course is continuous or assigned to a continuous term, the course will always be considered current.

Select dates

  • Start date and end date are specified.

  • The range between the start and end dates determines if it is current and available. These courses become unavailable after the end date, so they never appear in a past course list.

Days from date of enrollment

  • The start date of the course is the user's enrollment date. The end date of the course is the enrollment date plus a set number of days.

  • The end of this range signifies that the course is no longer current or available to the user. These courses never appear in a past course list.

Use term duration

  • A term has one of the above duration types which is also applied to the course.

  • When a course uses a term duration, it behaves as though the course was set to the same duration as the term.

Categorizing a course into current, past, or upcoming is more complicated when some properties are not set for a course. This is a common workflow for schools that create batches of generic course shells and then allow faculty to customize the properties. The following scenarios show how categorization occurs in these cases.

  • A course or term is set for start and end dates but no start date was specified. Then the user's date of enrollment is used as a start date.
  • A course is set to use start and end dates but neither of these values are set. Then the course is in the Current list as long as the student was enrolled within the last four months and has course activity within the last two months. If the time spans are longer, the course is included in a past course list.

Past courses

Available courses assigned to past terms appear in a course list section titled for the term, such as Summer 2018.

If an available course is in the past but is not associated with a term, the course is placed into a previous year list such as Completed in 2017.

Upcoming courses

Due to server time differences, brand new enrollments might appear briefly on the Upcoming course list. This generally occurs for only seconds. However, once a course is placed here, the app cache may keep the course in Upcoming for several minutes. Log out of the app and log in again to speed up the cache refresh.

Unavailable courses

Unavailable Original courses don't appear in the Blackboard app. Private Ultra courses are listed in the Blackboard app but students can't access them until an instructor opens them.