Primary Instructor improvements – 3900.62
Blackboard Learn SaaS
Ultra Experience
Ultra Course View, Original Course View
Impact: All users
The Ultra Course View supports the designation of a primary instructor. In the past, when a course contained more than one instructor any instructor could change the primary instructor setting. To support diverse needs regarding changes to this designation, now administrators may grant this as a privilege for system and course roles:
"Course/Organization Control Panel (Users and Groups) > Users > Set instructor as primary in Ultra Course View"
Administrators can now manage primary instructor designations SIS integration and REST API integration frameworks. The SIS integration framework supports the primary instructor indicator on course memberships through the flat file and XML formats.
The primary instructor designation impacts how course instructors display for a course.
- When no instructor is selected as primary, the first two instructors display based on alphabetical order in Ultra courses.
- When there is more than one instructor and only one is designated as primary, only one instructor displays in Ultra courses. The other instructors display when users select "Show more."
- When there is more than one instructor and two or more are designated as primary, at most two instructors display in Ultra courses.
- Course cards in the Base Navigation course timeline display primary instructors first for both Ultra and Original courses. Original courses do not have a user interface to set primary instructor so these must be set through integration.
To better support enrollment state management for archive/restore and course copy, we made a change. Now, when membership records are stored/retrieved, the primary instructor indicator is also stored/retrieved. Primary instructor designations are reflected as expected.
Image 1. In the course faculty only one instructor of many displays if only one is indicated as primary
For administrators: This feature is available for all Ultra courses and organizations. A user that needs to modify the Primary instructor flag will need this new Privilege: “Course/Organization Control Panel (Users and Groups) > Users > Set instructor as primary in Ultra Course View.” The primary instructor flag can be set for Original courses using data integration only. This will impact name order in Base Navigation.