Course design

The Digital Education Office can help you make the most of technology enhanced learning in your unit(s) or programme, including optimising the design of your Blackboard courses.

We can provide consultation, advice, support and training whether as part of a small targeted intervention, a Unit or Programme review, a School level initiative or within a Curriculum Review and Development process.

The DEO have also provided templates for Blackboard courses - you can learn more about them below.

Blackboard Ultra Template

Blackboard templates – developed by the Digital Education Office in collaboration with faculties – enhance the student experience by providing improved consistency, clarity and effectiveness of design across unit courses within a faculty and across the University.

Each unit course is pre-populated with standard sections and placeholder items within them. The overall structure and logic of these have been agreed at a faculty level, and should not be altered for individual units. However, there are areas that can and should be edited and personalised to meet each unit's requirements. Any sections within the placeholder items that require editing are clearly indicated in the templates. The template includes the sections below:

• Welcome: Introductory information to the unit, such as specific aims, objectives, details of what is provided for students, and instructions on how to navigate their learning materials within the course.
• Unit Information and Resources: Essential information and resources for students, including links to core resources such as the unit's resource list in Talis Aspire and Re/Play collection.
• Unit Assessment: Assessment information, submission points, access to guidelines, and feedback.
• Learning materials: the last sections will differ slightly across the three faculty templates, as they will reflect each faculty’s recommended structure (or structures) for organising teaching materials. These should be seen as an outline only, and edited/expanded upon and populated with the unit's content.

There are also two sections for staff only:

• Guidance and Support for Staff: Resources to help you populate and customise your course.
• Assessment, submission and feedback: A folder necessary for the integration between Blackboard and SITS, which should not be deleted, renamed or made visible to students. The submissions sent from eVision will appear in this folder and will need to be moved to the Unit Assessment learning module by whoever usually configures these assessment points.

You can watch a video tour of the template below.

The current template was co-designed by learning technology specialists and Student Digital Champions within the Digital Education Office, alongside academic and administrative staff from faculties. We would like to take the opportunity to thank all staff and students who contributed to the template development and evaluation, which allowed this iterated design to be finalised.