Each course available in Blackboard uses a factory-specific template, that structures a course menu as described in the Course Menu. Some parts will be available in every course menu, like ‘Course Information’, other parts will only be available for some faculties, like ‘Dashboard’. On the course opening page, you will see the Announcements relating to this course, which usually are messages about class cancellations, guest lectures, relevant presentations or talks, TV broadcasts, and so on.

A student is able to go to the announcements section in several ways:

• Specifically related to a course: after opening the course.
• For all courses together and ‘Institute-wide’: under the ‘My Blackboard’ screen, under ‘My Announcements’. The student is shown a compact list with a few announcements that are actual. To see all the actual announcements, the student has to click ‘More Announcements’.

The steps that instructors have to take to create an announcement are as follows:

• Make sure that the Edit Mode is turned ON.
  Click on Announcements in the course menu. The Announcements page opens:
  
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• Click on Create Announcement.
  The following screen appears:
  
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• Type in a title in the Subject field and a message in the Message text box.

The text editor shows text that is presented to the student. Above the text box, you will see button bars for formatting the text. For more information about the possibilities of the text editor, see the manual Course Content.

How long will an Announcement remain visible?

At the Web Announcement Options you may restrict the visibility of an announcement. The Date Restricted option is selected by default. Not Date Restricted means that the announcement will allways be shown. Date restricted announcements start at Display After en are actual untill Display Until. Standard behavior is that Blackboard suggests the timestamp of the actual day in Display After and 23:59 of the day after in Display Untill. This may be overruled by the instructor as shown in the example below.

 

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After Display Untill, the announcement will be deleted from the Announcements page that is presented to the students. The instructor will still be able to see the announcement and has the opportunity to change it (the message ‘Item is not available’ appears).

Course Link
Announcements are often used to inform students about new course materials. In such cases, a course link can be added to link directly to this new material.

After you have created an Announcement and defined its availability, you can post it by clicking on the Submit button at the top or the bottom of the screen.

The Announcement has been successfully posted if this is confirmed in the green bar at the top of the screen:

If you want to change or delete an Announcement, click on the double arrow behind the Announcement to open the roll-down menu:

The final announcement looks similar to the image below: