I see there are lots of posts about Calendar'ing, but I don't think any address my specific situation.
I'm taking 5 courses. Two of the courses show the Calendar button. Two others have it buried under Tools. The remaining one has no button for the Calendar.
None of the instructors have posted anything to their Calendars. I checked by looking at the Calendars within their courses and globally.
One feels using "My Lessons" does the same thing and doesn't intend to post the information on the calendar.
I'd like to enter all significant events for all of my courses into some place to keep track of them. I'd also like to be able to see everything all at once and just by course.
Given the situation I described, am I better off using the Calendar or Task list or something else? (I've excluded the To Do list since it seems to only work within individual courses.)
I don't see a way for me to enter the information into the Calendar on a course by course basis. And, it looks like using Tasks won't give me the capability to either view all events at once or view them one course at a time.
Would I be better off using a non-Blackboard calendaring system? Is there a way to do what I want within Blackboard, even if the instructors won't post to the Calendar for their courses?
Thanks.
Bruce,
The calendar function in Blackboard is pretty limited, and many instructors choose not to use their course calendars, as you''ve seen. However, only instructors can add information to the ourse calendar. The only calendar you can edit is your own personal calendar, though you can view that along with the course and institution calendars. You could create events on the personal calendar, and label them with the course name or course number, but it's not possible to filter down to see course by course.
The task list might also work, and you can sort based on title so you could group all the items together by course, but then you'd lose the date ordering. It's more oriented towards cheking off things that you've done.
If your school is using Blackboard Learn and has Notifications turned on, then due dates for items in the courses are automatically filled into "To Do", and in the version we have at our school (Learn 9.1), you can see a system-wide "To Do" list under the Notifications Dashboard as well as "To Do" lists in individual courses. It sounds as if that's not what you're seeing, though. You also don't ahve the option to manually enter items into the "To Do" list--it only includes what your instructors post in their courses.
Personally, I use Google calendar all the time. It has plenty of flexibility, options for earching and sorting, and you can set it up to send you notifications via email or text message a certain number of days before a due date.
Mike