Blackboard Course Merge

Are you teaching multiple sections of the same course and want a single Blackboard site to place content in for all of your students? The merging steps must be performed by system personnel. Please follow the instructions below. 

Instructions:

• Please select one of your sections (CRN) to be the source for the merging.  We will copy that site to become the "parent" and then merge the "child sites" into it.  If you are using a textbook supplement (from Cengage, McGraw-Hill, Macmillan, Pearson, etc.), please wait to link your course until the merged site is ready.  When your sites are merged, they will disappear from your list of Current Courses, and you will only see the combined site.
• If this is an eCampus class, you can depend on the course designers from the Instructional Development Center to accomplish the course merging for you. Be sure the course designer knows which site you want as the parent and which site(s) to include as child sites.
• For all other course merges, you must contact the IT service desk at 859-622-3000 or use the Contact Web form. State clearly which site you want to use as the source, what name you want to see for the merged site, and which site(s) to include as child sites. (Note: the name you give for the merged site will be seen by you and any other instructors. Your students will see the name for their registered section on Current Courses but will automatically be connected into the merged site.)

What happens:

• On your list of Current Courses, you see only one entry for the course; the others are completely hidden from your view.  Students see the entry for the section in which they registered.. 
• As students add to or drop from the sites, the system synchronizes all of the enrollments for you in the parent site.
• Inside the merged site, the Grade Center automatically gets a new column called Child Course ID, identifying the source site for each student.  Clicking the header for the Child Course ID sorts the rows for you.  (This feature makes it easy to view the grades for a particular section or to select those students as recipients for an email message, etc.).  
• To create Smart Views for the individual sections, begin at Grade Center > Full Grade Center > Manage > Smart Views > Create Smart View. Enter a name (such as the CRN for one of your sections) and set this as a Favorite. Set the Type of View to "Custom," and then set the User Criteria to "Child Course ID." Set the Condition to "Contains," and then set the Value to the relevant CRN. Under "FIlter Results," change the setting so that you will see "All Columns." Then click Submit. This places the name of the Smart View under your Grade Center links, and when you click it, you see the rows for the students from that CRN. 
• When you want to copy materials from another course site, you must be very careful to select the correct “Destination” from your list. You will see many possibilities, but you must look for the entry that displays a Course ID beginning with “3_” followed by the usual course number and ending with the current semester label (such as 3_ENG102_F22). Your merged site’s course ID does not contain the CRN from any of your sections.
• Should you decide that you want to unmerge the sections, you must contact the service desk at 859-622-3000.