Planning Your Course | The Educational Technology Center

Planning Your Course

Planning your Blackboard course site is possibly the most important step to ensure a successful online experience for your students. If you invest time in the planning stage, the course building and managing stages will be significantly easier.

Before you begin organizing the online component of your class, consider these critical questions:

  • Why am I using Blackboard for this course?
  • How much of this course will be Web-based?
  • How can the Web foster the learning goals specific to this course?
  • Which areas and tools in a Blackboard course site are best suited to particular learning outcomes?
  • How much time do I have to develop or convert course materials for effective online presentation?

As you try to answer these questions, it may be helpful to write a list of your reasons for using Blackboard. The resources linked below, available as PDFs, may spark some ideas:

Once you have a clear sense of your goals for using Blackboard, you can develop a prioritized task list for building your Blackboard site. At each stage of course development, ask yourself the most important question for instructional design: "Which learning materials and activities will best help students to learn the material and develop their analytical skills?"

If this is your first time using Blackboard, online course development may require more time than you anticipate. Consider using only a few of Blackboard's course areas (Announcements, Staff Information, Course Information, and Course Documents for handouts). The next time you teach a Blackboard course, you will feel comfortable enough to begin incorporating items like the Discussion Board, online quizzes and surveys, and the Collaboration Tools (Online Chat).

Planning Resources

Blackboard offers tip sheets to help plan your online course development process. In addition, the EdTech Center has developed its own handouts to help you plan your course. These documents are available as PDFs.