Online Learning

Blackboard News and Information

Winthrop University uses Blackboard for its learning management system. Blackboard is a powerful, easy-to-use software package for designing, delivering and maintaining online course information. The software is accessible to anyone in the world who has an Internet connection and an account provided by Winthrop University. You may log into Blackboard here.

Blackboard can be used as a supplement to traditional courses for posting course documents, posting/receiving assignments, managing grades, and communicating via e-mail and announcements. Blackboard can also be used to create and deliver web-enhanced, hybrid, and fully online courses. Here are just a few things that are built into Blackboard:

  • Turnitin and SafeAssign assignment integration for plagiarism detection
  • Lockdown Browser functionality for creating secure online tests
  • Enhanced grading workflow, a date management tool, and learning modules for course organization
  • Social learning and teaching tools such as wikis, blogs, journals, discussion board, and web conferencing

Parent Course Requests

The Blackboard Course Usage form can be used to request a parent course to have multiple sections of courses that you are teaching merged into one Blackboard shell. View the instructions for making a parent course request, then access the form via Wingspan on your Faculty Services Tab. Please complete this form each semester to request one or more parent courses. Parent courses will generally be created within three business days. 

Course Creation and Roster Updates

  1. Blackboard is integrated with Banner. With this integration, you will have more up-to-date information regarding the student enrollment within your Blackboard courses. You are also empowered to be in control of your own Blackboard content.
  2. There are several items pertaining to the integration that faculty should be aware of:
    • New/Blank courses will be created each semester: The integration will automatically create new/blank Blackboard courses for you each semester. Each course has a unique course ID in Blackboard which includes the course number, section, year, and term. The term is indicated by 80 for fall, 50 for summer, and 10 for spring.
    • Courses will be unavailable to students until you have opened them: Your students are automatically populated into your Blackboard courses at the time your courses are created. The courses are unavailable to the students until you make them available. View the instructions for how to make your courses open to students.
    • Blackboard course rosters will automatically update for you three times per day: The integration will automatically update your Blackboard rosters at 11am, 3pm, and 6:30pm each day to reflect the latest drop/add activity.
    • Faculty cannot manually add and drop students to/from their Blackboard rosters: Please contact the Office of Online Learning at x2212 or e-mail blackboard@winthrop.edu regarding any special circumstances surrounding your Blackboard rosters.

End of Semester Course Maintenance Tasks

  1. Download your grade center: We recommend that you download your grade center data into an Excel spreadsheet at the close of each semester. The office of Online Learning will continue to maintain archives of course grade center data, however we ask that you make it a best practice to download a backup of your grade center for all courses, so that you have your own personal backup. View instructions for how to download your grade center data.
  2. Courses will be disabled after the semester has ended: After the semester has ended, both instructors and students will have at least a 30 day grace period that will allow you some time after the semester has ended to continue to use those courses. After the grace period students will be removed from the courses. Instructors will retain access to courses for four years and can request older courses to be restored through the Office of Online Learning.

Training and Instructional Resources

Information regarding training sessions for the current semester and instructional resources are available on the Online Learning Faculty Training web page.