A New Term

If you are trying to remember how to get going at the start of term, read on…

Login

The easiest way to access Blackboard is via vle.aston.ac.uk. Log in using your Aston username and password. You can also find links to Blackboard in MAP, and on the staff intranet.

Welcome page

The courses you are enrolled on are listed on the right-hand side, under the Courses heading. If you are missing modules from this list, please contact the relevant Programme Support Team for your School.

Prepare your course

Reading lists

In your new course, there will be a link to the reading list for the current academic year. In many cases, last year’s list would have been duplicated for you. If your previous reading list contained any specifically cleared copyright material, please contact your Information Specialist.

Course Copy

New courses are created with the Aston template so you may want to copy over existing content from your old course using the Course Copy Tool.

Tidy up

Once you’ve completed the course copy, you’ll need to tidy up. Delete any unwanted content areas you don’t need (eg ones that were created as part of the template or that you brought over by mistake).

Add Panopto

Before you record anything in your module, you will need to provision (link) your Blackboard course with Panopto. Once this is done you will see the familiar controls in the Aston Replay section.

To make previous Panopto content available to the current year’s course – you will need to provision this year’s course, then select the relevant Panopto folder in last year’s Blackboard course.

Or, if you have copied over Panopto videos embedded in a content area, you can update the sharing permissions to ensure students can view them.

Date management

Depending upon what type of content you have copied from your old course you may need to adjust the dates relating to content such as adaptive release. You can do this in bulk using the Date Management tool.

View your course as a student

Use the Student Preview feature to see your course as a student. This will create a temporary student user and log you in as them.

Make the course available to students

By default, new courses are unavailable to students. They must be made available by the start of term, please see Making a Course Available or Unavailable if you do not know how to do this.