Create the appropriate folders for course documents and assignments.

If you are teaching by MODULES, construct your course documents to reflect that. If you are teaching by WEEKS or some other increment, label your folders appropriately.

Add these as course documents or assignments OR as external links.

Create the threads for discussion and decide how you are going to evaluate postings, if applicable.

Create questions that students must answer (for credit) in response to readings or lectures.

Encourage students to answer other students' questions... and you can clarify where necessary.

Create groups and assignments whenever appropriate! Allow them to have their own group discussion board and chat room, and encourage them to problem-solve for presentation to the class as a whole.

Include these requirements in course information (syllabus) and in the specific documents used when making the assignments.

Encourage students to provide their presentation notes/slides for posting in Blackboard.

Lecture notes can be posted after lecture so that students who might not "get it" in lecture can review. Most students will not intake everything that is dicussed during lecture, and they will not be able to note most of what is discussed. Therefore, it helps them to have your lecture notes or outline - which are bound to be more correct than any note-taker's notes.

One thing to include in lecture notes would be graphics to break up the text. Another would be hyperlinks to associated websites, definitions of terms, or other links within your document.

It is also helpful to students to post any PowerPoint presentations so that students can review from those. However, please note that raw PowerPoint files can be very large - and therefore can take hours to download! Better alternatives include saving the PowerPoint presentations as HTML files or as PDFs which can be easily downloaded.

Putting lecture outlines online before lecture is a good way for students to prepare for class.

The UTHSC Library has a streaming server available. This means that digitized materials can be loaded onto the server and accessed via a link from Blackboard.

The UTHSC Library's Multimedia Lab has hardware that you can use to digitize your video or audio.

Please contact the Library for more information about their streaming server.

Recycling

If you have information already on the web, update and use it! If you have things created electronically, save them as HTML or PDF. If you have hard copies, use the scanner. You can scan directly to Adobe Acrobat to create PDF files, or you can scan in a document and save it as an editable word processing document.