Managing Access to your Course
How are students added to courses?
All registered students will be able to access their respective Blackboard class sites within the first two days of the semester. Adds will be processed intermittently during the first two weeks and again after the add period has ended.
Instructional Computing will also load students into the Organization sites for Majors and Minors.
All other organization sites (Clubs, Student Service areas, etc) are not loaded by Instructional Computing. Students can either self enroll into those sites or the manager of the site can add the students manually via the Control Panel.
Should you have a student who does not have access to your site (perhaps they added late), you can manually add them to your site.
As an instructor, you can also decide whether or not you want students to be able to self enroll into your Blackboard site. You can also allow Guest Access to your course.
Students cannot add themselves to your course unless you allow them to. If you would like to enable this feature, here's how you can do so:
Information for how students can self enroll. . .
One of my students is unsure of their username, how can I help them?
How are TA's and Co-Instructors added?
In order to assign someone TA or Instructor access to your Blackboard site, they must have a Blackboard account. All registered students have Blackboard accounts, this includes Graduate students.
All faculty and staff do not automatically receive a Blackboard account unless they are listed as an instructor or TA for the class in Peoplesoft. If you have a faculty/staff member who needs to access to your Blackboard site and they do not have an account, they will need to fill out the request form available at: http://naples.cc.sunysb.edu/DoIT/bbreq.nsf/bbuseracctreq
The Blackboard support team does not add TA's or Instructors other than the requestor of the account to Blackboard sites. This is something that Instructors need to do.
If you would like your TA's or Co-Instructors to automatically have access, you will need to ask your department to add them to the class via PeopleSoft
If you would like to add either a TA or another Instructor to your class, please be aware that it is a 2 step process.
1st Step: Adding someone to your course
You will then need to change their status from Student -> Course Builder (if they are undergraduates) Graduate Students may have TA status
2nd Step: Change their access level from Student to TA or Instructor
What are the different roles in Blackboard?
Course Roles include:
Course Builder
The Course Builder role has access to most areas of the Control Panel. This
role is appropriate for a user to manage the course without having access
to Student grades. All Undergraduate TA's must be assigned this role
and not TA since Undergraduates are not allowed to access other student's
grades.
Note: A Course Builder can still access the course if the course is unavailable to Students. A Course Builder cannot remove an Instructor from a Course.
Grader
A Grader assists the Instructor in the creation, management, delivery, and
grading of Assessments. A Grader also assists the Instructor with managing
the Gradebook.
Note: A Grader cannot access a course if it is unavailable to Students.
Guest
Users with the role of Guest have no access to the Control Panel. Areas within
the course can be made available to Guests. Visitors such as prospective students,
alumni or parents may be given the role of Guest.
Instructor
Instructors have access to all areas in the Control Panel. This role is generally
given to those developing, teaching or facilitating the class. Instructors
may still access a course that is unavailable to Students.
Student
Student is the default Course Role. Students has no access to any areas on
the Control Panel.
Teaching Assistant
Teaching Assistants have access to most features. If the course is unavailable
to Students, Teaching Assistants may still access the course.
Note: A Teaching Assistant cannot
remove an Instructor from a course.
How are students removed from courses?
Blackboard does not provide us with the tools to batch remove students who have dropped classes during the semester.
SOLAR is the official class roster, not Blackboard! When determining which students should be removed from your course, use your SOLAR roster.
To see who has dropped your course, log into SOLAR and access
your Class Roster. You will see something similiar to this: 
Change the Enrollment Status to: Dropped
The system will list all of the students who have dropped, you can also download the file if you wish.
Take the list of Dropped students and log into Blackboard.
Instructors can remove students* who have dropped via the Control Panel Option.
*Removal of a student is permanent! When students are removed, all files associated with the student are also removed, including: grades, student file submissions.
You have 2 options. They are:
Search by Student's Name (This can be time consuming if you have a lot of students):
OR
If you have a lot of students who have dropped, the easiest way is to press Search. Blackboard will list all students who are in your Blackboard course.
Go to the last page and work backwards, one page at a time.
Example : let's say you have 10 pages.
Go to Page #10, check off all of the student's on that page who have dropped and then type Yes in the box at the bottom and then press submit. Then go to page 9, then 8, etc.
The reason why you need to work backwards is because if you start on page 1, if you were to remove 5 students from page one, it would move 5 students from page 2 to page 1 and this will make you crazy!
All students are removed from courses after the "Last day to complete an Incomplete" the semester after a course has finished.
Does Blackboard have Guest access?
Blackboard does have Guest access, in other words, someone can access your site without a Blackboard account.
To turn on/off this access:
If you would like to allow guests, you will need to let Blackboard know what areas of the course they are allowed to access.
How can Guests access my course?