Navigating the Courses Page

Blackboard’s Courses page lists all courses that are available to you in Blackboard. They may be courses you teach (instructor role), courses you are taking (student role), or courses in which you have additional roles.

Courses listed on the Courses page are arranged by term. The initial display on the Courses page is Current Courses. As Blackboard describes it, the Current Courses display will show you all courses for which “the term duration is in the present.” Terms in Blackboard include Fall, Spring, and Summer academic terms; Educational Development Center (EDC) terms; and Development term. The development term is where you’ll find zdev and zshare courses, if you are associated with any. In Current Courses, you may therefore see, courses you are teaching this semester, EDC training you are enrolled in, and a zdev shell in which you are updating course content.

If you’d like to see courses from a term that isn’t current, such as last semester’s courses, or just see courses for a single term, click Current Courses and a drop down list will appear. You can then select any term to display only courses for that term. Please note that courses are only in Blackboard for a finite period of time. You will not be able to access content from your courses in Blackboard after that time has passed. We encourage you to export or archive a copy of your course at the end of each term to save it beyond this deletion date.

You can also move from term to term using the navigation arrow in line with the Current Courses drop down. The navigation arrows will take you to the previous or next term that is available to you in Blackboard.

If you’ve been teaching for some time at COD, or teach a lot of courses, you can use the Search your courses field to help find specific courses.

Another handy feature to find a specific course in Blackboard is the Filter drop down menu. With the Filter menu, you can filter by items such as:

• Courses I teach
• Courses I am taking
• Open courses (also known as available to students)
• Private courses (also known as unavailable to students)
  
  

If you’ll be accessing the same courses frequently, you can Star your courses on the courses page. Just click the Star icon (it will turn purple) on your listed course, and it will appear as a favorite at the top of the page each time you log in and navigate to the Courses page. When you no longer want a course included in the favorites, simply click the star again (it will turn white) to remove it from the top of the page. Unfortunately, it’s not currently possible in Blackboard to favorite an entire term, or change the order courses are displayed to you within a current term’s listing.

You can also change the way your course listing appears on your Course page. You can toggle between Grid View and List View by selecting the buttons next to the Search Your Courses field.

To further customize your courses page, you can Hide courses that are not currently relevant to you. To Hide a course:

1. Navigate over a course in either List View or Grid View.
2. A button to view More Options will appear. The button is three horizontal dots (an ellipsis).
   
   
   
   
3. Click the three dots and select Hide course to hide the course from your view. Note: This only hides the course from you, it does not hide it from your students or any other users in Blackboard.  
   
   

Your course will no longer appear to you on the Courses page. To Show the course again:

1. Click the Filter drop down menu and select Hidden from me.
   
   
   
   
2. Click the ellipsis on the course listing
   
   
   
   
3. Select Show course. The course will then reappear on your list of courses.
   
   

Please note that you are not able to hide courses if you have the role of Student in a course.