Managing Your Course

Making Your Course Available

Each semester, you will need to make your Blackboard course available to your students. You may not make your course available until two weeks prior to the first official day of class. For example, if the semester begins August 26th, you may make the course available on August 12th.

Every section listed in MyMav will receive a course shell. All course shells are unavailable by default. You may choose whether or not to use the course shell. If you do not want to use it for the semester, simply leave the course shell as is (unavailable).

Following these instructions to make the course shell available to students.

  1. Log in to Blackboard and click on the name of your course.
  2. Scroll down to the Control Panel area and click on Customization.
  3. Select Properties.
  4. In the second section, you’ll see Set Availability.
  5. Choose Yes under Make Course Available?
  6. Click Submit at the bottom of the page.

If at any point you wish to make the course unavailable to students, follow these instructions again and choose “No.” If you have multiple sections of a course, you must make each course section available. Watch a tutorial video on this process.

After you’ve made the course available, e-mail your students and inform them that you are using Blackboard. Below is a sample e-mail to send to your students. Please feel free to copy and paste this sample e-mail.

Dear Students,
This course will utilize Blackboard this semester.

  • To access the course, go to elearn.uta.edu and log in with your NetID and password. Click on the name of the course in the upper left module after logging in.
  • If you have any problems logging in, contact the Help Desk (helpdesk@uta.edu).
  • Review the Student Resources page. This site contains valuable information that will acclimate you to your course and the Blackboard environment.

Important!
If you plan on merging multiple sections into a single shell, do not make any of the individual course sections available until they have been merged. Complete Section Merge requests.