Blackboard Vista 4 Course Design Guidelines

A few Vista course construction protocols in addition to notes posted during our Blackboard Vista migration:

• Use banner.jpg on the homepage, not the front.jpg--that's too big with our current design.


• Lessons in Learning Modules should be complete: they need to be linear, and include any quizzes, discussions, or assignments attached to a given lesson.


• HIDING most Tool links in the Course Tools menu may reduce student confusion and encourage them to access activities in the proper order. This is done by going to Manage Course > Course Menu and HIDE on Assessments, Assignments, Discussions, Learning Modules--this is important because
  
  
  
  1. we don't want students to wander aimlessly--the lesson is the core of the course;
  
  
  2. the labels for these areas do not always match the instuctors' labels, adding more confusion
  
  
  3. these general areas often put items in "alphabetical order", also known as "arbitrary order". We manually structure learning modules for a reason.
  
  


• If lessons have titles or subtitles, put them in the Description field of the learning modules.


• Make sure the CSS files are referenced by course pages. This problem is evident if the font is a serif, rather than sans-serif, font.


• When making quizzes follow these guidlines unless specifically instructed not to:
  
  
  
  • Midnight should be interpreted as 11:55pm/11:59pm not 12:00am
  
  
  • Release the score once the quiz has been submitted and all the questions have been graded.
  
  
  • Do NOT 'Show the correct answer for each question.'
  
  
  • Randomize answer choices in multiple choice quizzes
  
  
  • Add questions to a quiz using a question set to randomize question order