Information Technology Services

by IDLT

If you are someone who exports and imports your Blackboard course each term, does it feel like it takes longer each time to manage this? That’s because it does. Your course grows with files and links each time you teach it. Here are some tips to help speed up your next export/import and how to have a left navigation you and your students will appreciate. 

• Clean up left navigation. When importing an old course, it will also bring over all those divider lines, subheaders, and duplicate “Other Resources” links. It takes a small amount of time to delete any duplicates and divider lines. It will also save a lot of scrolling for you and the students! Visit this ITS KnowledgeBase article to learn more about how add or delete items in the left navigation or course menu.  

• Check out your course’s content collection. The course content collection is where all the files uploaded into the course are stored. Navigate to Course Management>Files>COURSEID (the course ID). First, look at the Accessibility column. If you do not see an accessibility score icon in that column (for DOCX, PDF, PPTX files), then the file is not being used in the course and it can be deleted. Another indicator is if you have multiple versions of the same file with (1), (2), (3), etc. behind the filename. You can delete any old versions of those files.  

• Tips for preventing uploading multiple files in the future. One of the best practices for putting files into Blackboard is to upload them to the course’s content collection first and then deploying them in the course. Also, instead of adding and removing files within a content piece in Blackboard, use the Overwrite File feature from the drop-down menu. 

• Keep your navigation simple. Do you have folders within folders within folders? The rule of thumb is to have content no more than 3 clicks in, which means it should not take more than 3 clicks to get to the piece of content in which you are needing. The easier it is to find, the less likely it will be duplicated in the course. 

• Start from scratch. If you have a course that has been imported multiple times and your content collection is looking a bit messy, the easiest thing may be starting over with a clean slate. You can still copy content from the old course, but by not using the export/import feature, you avoid bringing in a lot of unwanted content. 

For additional information on the course’s content collection, visit these ITS KnowledgeBase articles. If you would like assistance in organizing or cleaning up your course, please contact the ITS-Instructional Design & Learning Technologies team at idlt_center@siue.edu or 618-650-5500.