Chapter 3
Uploading Your Syllabus
The first item most instructors want to place in their online course site is a copy of the course syllabus.
Prepare your syllabus: To do this, use the UF adopted, MS Word document syllabus form. A blank copy can be accessed under the Community tab. Click on the organizational level titled Faculty Resource Center and you will find the syllabus under "Electronic Forms."
Be careful when naming any file. Instructors and students should eliminate spaces or non-alphanumeric characters from file names. To prevent problems opening the file, only underscores should be used to space out file names. For example, "English_comp_101.doc" is acceptable, but "English-Comp-101.doc" is not acceptable. For information on naming your file, refer to Appendix A.
To Upload Your Syllabus:
- Click the "Course Information" link in the Content Areas section of the Control Panel.
- Click the "Add Item" button in the upper left corner.
You may use the default name or rename the syllabus with the pulldown menu or in the text box provided. - Scroll down to the Content Attachments section and click the "Browse" button. Using the resulting pop-up window, locate your syllabus file on your computer.
- Once you have visually located the syllabus on your computer, click to highlight the file and then click the "Open" button.
- Type in the name of the file to link (e.g. Syllabus English 410) and choose the desired file options.
- Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click "Submit" to save your changes to Blackboard. Click "OK" to acknowledge the receipt of your changes.
- Click "OK" to return to the Content Areas section of the Control Panel OR use the breadcrumb trail, located at the top of the screen, to return to the Control Panel.
Once you have uploaded any document, such as a syllabus, or ask Blackboard to execute any process (by clicking the Submit button), you will receive a receipt to acknowledge the requested process has been performed. Always click OK to confirm the receipt.
If you find a mistake in your syllabus, you will have to click the "Remove" button to the right of the current version of the file on Blackboard and then re-upload a corrected version. The software used to create a file must also be used to edit it. Once you have corrected the document, remove the incorrect version from Blackboard, and then upload the corrected file as described above.