Announcements are useful for communicating short items of news about your course.   Examples could be an announcement about: a change of venue for a seminar, a reminder of a deadline, or to let students know that you have added some new material to your Blackboard course.

Edit Mode

1. Check that Edit Mode is turned ON.  This can be switched by clicking ON or OFF.

Click on Announcements

2. To get to the announcements screen either click on Announcements from your course menu, or go into the Control Panel, Course Tools area and click onAnnouncements.

Create Announcement

3. Click on Create Announcement to add a new announcement.

Enter the Announcement

4. Enter a subject for your announcement. It is best to keep these short and meaningful. You may also set the color of the announcement.

5. Enter the announcement message.

Options

6. Select the options according to your preferences:

Duration
You can set the announcement to either by Not Date Restricted or Date Restricted. If the announcement is Not Date Restricted then it will be visible to students until the setting is changed. If it is date restricted it will be visible only according to the date restrictions which will appear below when that option is set.

Select date restrictions
Select the range of dates in which the announcement will appear.

To display an announcement from a date forward, tick and select a date in the Display After area but do not select the Display Until option. To display an announcement for a specific amount of time tick and select a date in the Display After field, check Display Until, and select a date.

Send a copy of this announcement immediately
If a student decides to opt out of receiving announcements via email then ticking this box will over ride that setting and send the announcement anyway.

 

Good to know: by default when you post an announcement on a course that is available to students, all users (instructors/teaching assistants/students) on the course will receive an email containing the announcement.  The email will appear to come from an automated account we named “Blackboard Robot”.  The email will be sent within an hour of you posting the announcement. Users may opt out of receiving such emails by changing their notification settings. If an announcement is really important and you wish to override anyone’s preference to not receive announcement emails you can choose “send a copy immediately”.  This will send the announcement email to all course users regardless of the preference they set in their notification settings.  The email will appear to come from you, rather than “Blackboard Robot”. if you set the announcement to appear in the future, the email notifications should be sent on or just after the time you set the announcement to appear. if you set the announcement to appear in the future, email notifications will be sent only to students who were on the course when the announcement was created, not when the announcement was set to be released. Blackboard will not allow you to set an announcement to appear in the future and tick the box to send it immediately. If you try this, you will receive an error message. if you create an announcement on a course that is not available to students and tick “send a copy of this announcement immediately” the announcement email will be sent immediately to all users on the course even though the course is not available. if you create an announcement on a course that is not available to students and do not tick “send a copy of this announcement immediately” then no email is sent.  When the course is made available later no email is sent for that announcement either. if you modify an announcement and “Send a copy of this announcement” is ticked an email will be sent to all users containing your announcement text. if you modify an announcement and “Send a copy of this announcement” is not ticked then no announcement email will be sent. if you modify an announcement created by someone else, you become the author of the announcement. if you edit an announcement with “Not Date Restricted” selected, the announcement date will update to the current time when you click Submit. To retain the original posting date, you must select “Date Restricted” and the last edited posting date should appear under “Display After.”

Course Link?

7. You can use this option to link to an area of your course, clicking on Browse will open the course map. You may then choose an area and select it. When the announcement is posted students will be able to click on that link to go straight to that area of the course. This can be useful if you wish to highlight a new part of your course and give your students an easy route to access it directly.

Click Submit to Finish

8. Click on Submit to finish.

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