Blackboard is an academic website used by many, but not all, CIT lecturers on campus as a communication tool for their courses. They can upload lecture notes, have online discussions, and you can submit assignments through the site also. If your lecturer uses Blackboard, you will be able to:

* View/print course documents such as the syllabus, assignments, and class readings
* Use your CIT email to easily contact your lecturer and any student in your class
* Read class announcements
* View your class scores

Staff Accounts : Your Blackboard username is your Web for Faculty login and password.

Student Accounts :Your blackboard username is your Web for Student login & password.

Get into the Internet and go to the CIT Blackboard login web address: http://elearning.cit.ie In the Login Here module on the right, type your username and your Blackboard password as specified above. Then click on the Login button. If you are having trouble logging in, click here

Once the information is inputed into Banner, it will be updated when the script runs at midnight.

The internet setting is set to high or may be to custom. Internet Explorer is, by default, set to custom high. You need to change this setting to medium.

Staff Accounts :Staff A script is run daily which takes all existing data from the student record system Banner and updates it in Blackboard. Please check Web for Faculty to check that you can access the class lists for each module / CRN being taught by you. In the event that there are discrepancies (e.g. missing modules or students) you should please notify the problem by email webforfaculty.list@cit.ie or telephone. Once updated in Banner, the course will be available in Blackboard within 15 minutes.

Student Accounts :A script is run daily which takes all existing data from the student record system Banner and updates it in Blackboard. You are automatically enrolled against the modules that you have successfully registered against. In the event that there are discrepancies e.g. missing modules you should please notify your course co-coordinator Your lecturer has the option to use Blackboard or not. If you are in a “Blackboard class”, your lecturer will announce it. Even then, your lecturer needs to make it available to his/her students (which may not occur for several weeks into the semester). If you have any questions, please first ask your lecturer.

Your password cannot be changed in Blackboard as all data is extracted from banner on a daily basis. Use Web For Faculty (Lecturers) and Web For Student (students) to change your password. This change will be reflected in Blackboard within 24 hours or when the script next runs.

On the right side of the Blackboard Welcome screen is the My Courses module containing all of your courses whose lecturers are using Blackboard and have made it accessible to his/her students. Simply click on the course’s name to view its Blackboard content.

If your Blackboard problem is specific to your course, please contact your lecturer. If you have a general Blackboard question, you can contact us either by email (elearning@cit.ie) or by phone (021-4326592)

Blackboard requires cookies to be enabled by your web browser. Follow the directions given to you to enable them (this can vary depending on the machine you are working on and the version of software that you are using).

Your lecturer will insert, into various Content Areas of your Blackboard course, a number of files that you will need to read, save/edit, or print. The easiest way of doing this is to right-click the name of the file and select one of the following choices:

Here is where lecturers post important announcements related to the course. By default, announcements from the last 7 days are visible; however, you may change the view by selecting a tab at the top of the announcements.

By default, only the past seven days of announcements are displayed. By clicking on either the VIEW LAST 30 DAYS tab or the VIEW ALL tab, you will be able to read past announcements.

Lecturers will present information in the course content area in a variety of ways. Note that the text of the buttons may change, and the kind of information to be found in each area is up to the lecturer. The Course Information area is normally used by the lecturer to present descriptive information about the course, such as course syllabus and course description.

With most courses, your lecturer will put the course material in this area. Here you may find lecture notes, PowerPoint presentations, graphics and sounds that were developed by your lecturer for this course.

Lecturers may include material describing your course’s homework assignments or projects, or providing the (location of) resources enabling you to complete your work.

Blackboard offers many features for communicating with your lecturer and with other students. In particular, these include email and Discussion Board

The Discussion Board is a communication tool to log student participation in collaborative learning activities. The basic unit of a Discussion Board is the message. A message and all of the replies to that message are collectively called a thread. Threads are stored in forums. Each forum is set up by the lecturer. All of the forums together form the Discussion Board. Participants in the discussion do not all have to be available at the same time. You can log in and read messages and respond to them any time.

Your lecturer may want you to see other websites related to the course. The External Links content area is a place to put links to those websites.

There are several course tools available in Blackboard. These include the Digital Drop Box and checking your grades (if your lecturer uses the Blackboard gradebook program).

No. Each student will only be able to see their own grades.

There are a number of easy to follow steps for converting a set of TestGen questions into Blackboard questions, broadly these creating a “web test” in the TestGen software, after which you should export your selected questions into QTI format. Once in QTI format the question bank can then be added to your Blackboard course by choosing to “Import” content (under the “Manage Course” option in the Build tab).

For detailed step-by-step instructions please click here

If the files in question are office files or files associated with some software other than your web browser or other web-based formats (e.g. Flash, pdf etc) then the problem might have to do with a default setting in Internet Explorer (or other Browser) which blocks the download of non web-based files. Generally in such instances an information bar will be displayed right below the address bar in the browser telling the user a file has been blocked. The user can click on that bar to download the file but should be aware that this action takes you back to the main page after which they have to return to the link they want again.

To convert your word files to PDF format, In Microsoft Word  click on file then save as  and then pick the PDF format

Click here for instructions regarding how to prevent the information bar appearing.

You can download the assignments by following the instructions here

This means that the instructor has not added any course content into the Blackboard course for your class. You will need to contact the instructor to find out additional information concerning the course, as the lecturer may be using a different medium of distributing information.

If you are copying a cross-listed course from a previous semester please ensure that you copy from the parent and not the child.  If you wish to duplicate a course please click here for instructions

Blackboard now uses a term system to hide unused CRN from blackboard and shows modules only in the current term. click here for more details

Cross listing is the ability to join two or more sections together to share content and enrollments

Please click here for information

Please click here for details

To see information on pop up blockers and browser checks please click here

Please click here for info

How do I export Question Database to another course

Please click here for instructions

Since Blackboard has yet to certify the new Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4 browsers as reliable with its product, it’s strongly recommended that you do not upgrade your browser(s) to either of these versions, which were just released in March. If you have upgraded already, you should uninstall, then re-install IE 8 and/or Firefox 3.6. IE 9 will work better in Compatibility View. Chrome 10 has not been certified by Blackboard yet, either.

The Modules in Blackboard are generated from a script, that runs from the student record system – Banner . Click here to find out more information on the procedure.