It's great that you can close up items to make it easier to see a number of items in a folder, but is there any way to make the default view closed? I encourage instructors who have previously used html pages which required frequent updating to recreate them as items using Blackboard's editor. The difficulty is that if you have four or five pages in a folder the default appearance is with all pages open which requires a lot of scrolling to see what's available. Using the close tab cleans it up but can't we set that as default somehow?
Kip,
No I'm afraid there's no way to make the default view "closed" on newly created content items. However, in my (brief) testing, it looks like Blackboard remembers whether the instructor left the item "open" or "closed" when they last viewed that page in Edit mode. So, if they close items they no longer want to see details on, I believe they will still be closed the next time the instructor goes back to that screen--at least, they did when I tried logging out and logging back in again.
Also, just to be sure you've noticed this, only instructors can see content items as "closed" because it's a setting that's only in effect when viewing the course with Edit mode on. With Edit mode off--or when viewing as a student, where there is no Edit mode--all items are "open", unless they are not visible at all.
Mike