Organizing Content in Scholar
The lack of defined content areas in Ultra courses provides instructors with the freedom to use the given tools to organize their content in whatever way works best for their curriculum. Ultra courses provide two tools for organizing course content: Folders, and Modules.
Folders
Folders can serve as generalized ‘bins’ to store content in, allowing instructors to create their own categories of content. To create a folder, click on the plus sign and choose Create.
Choose Folder from the right-side menu.
Give the folder a name at the top, change "Hidden from students" to "Visible to students" if you want them to see it, and type any descriptive text in the Description field.
Note: The individual content items placed inside a folder also have their own separate visibility settings. This allows you to hide items within a folder even if the folder itself is visible to students. However, the visibility settings for the folder take priority in Blackboard’s system; if you set a folder to be ‘hidden to students’, the contents will not be visible to students even if they are set to ‘visible to students'.
Click Save and the folder will be created.
You can add things to the folder by clicking a similar plus sign from inside the folder. To enter a folder either to view its contents or add items to it, simply click the folder name, or the dropdown icon on the far right. .
You can change the order of items in the course content, as well as move them into and out of folders by hovering over the items, clicking the move icon, and dragging them where you want them.
Learning Modules
Learning Modules seem similar to Folders at first, but provide one major difference: they include settings that allow instructors to control the order in which students access the content inside. This is particularly useful for curriculum that must be accessed in sequence in order to be effective. These tools also provide the instructor to monitor how far into a module a student has accessed.
To create a learning Module, select Create from the Create Content menu.
From the resulting sidebar, select Learning Module.
The module’s basic settings will open. From here, you can name the module and provide a description. If you wish to use the Module features to require students to advance through the module’s content in sequence, check “Forced Sequence”. You can also add a cover image to each individual module. When you have finished, click “Save” to save the module in your content feed.
Note: If ‘Forced Sequence’ is not checked, the Learning Module will behave similarly to a folder.
You can add things to the module by clicking a similar plus sign from inside the module , or clicking and dragging existing items on your Content feed into the module. To enter a module either to view its contents or add items to it, simply click the Module name, or the dropdown icon on the far right.
You can change the order of items in the course content, as well as move them into and out of folders by hovering over the items, clicking the move icon, and dragging them where you want them. This is especially important in Learning Modules with Forced Sequence active, as the order of content in the module will determine the specific sequence in which students must access the module’s content.
Learning modules allow you to view the extent to which students have progressed through the module. To do so, open the menup at the top right of the module and select ‘Student Progress’.
You will be brought to a list of students that shows whether a student has started, completed, or unopened the module, along with timestamps.
From a student perspective, modules will not be openable from the main content feed. Instead, they will be able to click “Start” at the top of the module if they are starting a module for the first time, or “Continue” if they have previously opened the module.
The student will be brought inside the first item in the module, and be shown a list of the module’s contents. If Forced Sequence is active, the student will have the opportunity to use the first item, or navigate to the item immediately following it; later items will be greyed out and inaccessible until all the items above them in the sequence have been accessed.
Once the student has accessed the module, the progress bar seen in this sidebar will also be visible on the front of the module in the Content Feed.