| About Blackboard Accessing/Logging In to CMS Finding Your Class Navigating Within CMS Using the Group Pages and Discussion Board in CMS |
About Blackboard
If you already know how to use Blackboard (or, by its proper name, the Course Management System, CMS), just go to CMS directly:
If you are uncertain how to use Blackboard, or even what it is, read on!
What is now the Course Management System (CMS) was once upon a time known as Blackboard. The name Blackboard fell out of official circulation a while back, and so very few references to "Blackboard" still exist on the Northwestern web site. However, in everyday speech, people are still likely to use the old name out of habit. For the sake of consistency and accuracy, we will refer to Blackboard as CMS from here on out within this web page. Just know that if a professor talks about Blackboard, and you see CMS on the web site, it's really all referring to the same thing.
So what, then, is CMS? CMS is a web-based forum available for all classes taught at Northwestern, allowing for all manner of electronic interactions between faculty and students: discussion boards, class announcements, class rosters, assignment dropboxes and syllabi can all be made available to students within each class. In our program, faculty most often use CMS for the purposes of making announcements to the class, and for assigning specific small-group discussion areas. This allows you to continue conversations about various texts outside of the specified meeting times for the class.
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Accessing/Logging In to CMS
Be aware that CMS works best over a broadband connection (DSL or cable modem) and can be a bit slow when accessed via dialup. If all you have at home is a modem, you can feel free to use any of the computer labs on campus for using CMS ... or you can simply use your modem and be patient.
That said, in order to get to the login page for CMS, go to:
http://course-management.northwestern.edu/
You will be prompted for your netid and password. This is the same netid and password combination that you use for virtually everything at Northwestern: to check your e-mail, register for classes via CAESAR, log in to computers at the public labs on campu, and so forth. Please keep in mind that Northwestern requires you to change your netid password every 180 (approximately once a quarter). If you allow your password to expire, you will be unable to access CMS until you reset your password (which requires a trip to the Information Center at Kresge Hall).
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Finding Your Class
After clicking on the login button, you will be taken to a rather busy-looking page which politely greets you with the text "Welcome, John" (or whatever your name is). Under this greeting, you will see some information grouped into a number of different boxes: "My Announcements" and "My Calendar" to the left, and "My Courses" to the right. This last box is, predictably, where you will find the links to individual course sites.
The names of individual courses may vary somewhat but will generally include the course number. The default course names (which can be modified by your instructor) are typically the full catalog name of the course. MS_ED 406 might be listed as "2003Fall MS_ED406-0_SEC20 Research and Analysis in Teaching and Learning I: Discussion and Question Development," for instance. All you have to do is click on the class whose CMS site you wish to enter, and you'll be all set.
Just so you are aware, the possibility exists that you might see "leftover" class links from previous quarters. The CMS listings usually clean themselves up pretty nicely at the end of each quarter, but occasionally an old class manages to hang around somehow. This is just a minor glitch, and nothing you need to worry about.
If you do not see a listing for your class, even though your professor insists that it should be there, there are two possible reasons:
1) The CMS site has not actually been made "available" to the students. All of the sites are automatically available to the course instructors, but your instructor will need to actually make the site "available" to students as well before you will be able to see the link. It may take up to two business days for the link to show up to students after the instructor makes the site "available," but it usually appears more quickly than that.
2) You are not actually registered for the course in question. CMS builds its list of enrolled students by cross-referencing the registrar's database, not by consulting any unofficial list in the instructor's hand. If the registrar does not think that you are enrolled in a class, neither will CMS. You will need to go to CAESAR in order to verify that you are, in fact, registered for the course.
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Once you are within the CMS site for a specific class, everything should become much more intuitive. By default, you will enter the "Announcements" section of the site, which is where your instructor will leave specific messages for the class as a whole (often clarifications about homework assignments or readings). Students are unable to post to the "Announcements" section – only the course instructor can do that.
You can navigate the CMS site by using the buttons on the left-hand side of the window. By default, there are several navigation buttons, though it is possible for your instructor to reduce the clutter somewhat if he or she is savvy with CMS settings. In most cases, the most important section by far is the "Communication" section. This button will take you to a page with a number of options, including "Group Pages." It is here that the instructor will create specific discussion areas for each individual breakout group.
You may also be able to use CMS to get course syllabi or electronic versions of course handouts, or even to submit homework assignments, depending on which features your instructor chooses to use when setting up the site. Some classes may also make use of a "Discussion Board" section, which is very similar to the "Group Pages" – the only exception is that the "Discussion Board" includes everyone enrolled in the class, not just a smaller group within a class.
Using the Group Pages and Discussion Board in CMS
When you click on the link for your group (they are typically named after the TA who is leading your group), you will come to a page that lists all of the group members. There will be the obvious link to your group's discussion board and also a link to "Send E-mail." The e-mail feature will allow you to send an e-mail message to any combination of people in your discussion group (you simply have to click a checkbox next to each name you wish to include). The feature is potentially very useful, but do be aware that it will, by default, be sending e-mail to the @northwestern.edu address for each of your classmates. This may or may not be their preferred email address, and so some people may miss the message.
In the Group Discussion Board area, discussions are divided into separate forums. In most cases, there is only one forum per discussion group, though an instructor or TA may wish to further subdivide the discussion area with multiple forums: one to discuss readings, one for administrative information, one to organize social gatherings, and so forth.
Within a specific forum, you can compose a new message by clicking the "Add New Thread" button near the upper portion of the screen. You can also read existing messages by clicking on them, and there will be a "Reply" button at the bottom of each message, allowing you to compose a direct reply to a given post. Do be aware that when replying to a message, your new message will be considered part of the same "thread" as the message to which you are replying, and thus will be nested under the first message in the thread. Discussion threads can be collapsed or expanded to aid in navigation, and all unread messages will be highlighted to bring them to your attention.
Unless your instructor chooses to set up a discussion board differently, you will not be able to post anonymously, and you will not be able to delete a post once you have submitted it to the message board. All posts are timestamped (so it will become obvious who is having trouble getting to sleep late at night). As you become more comfortable with the discussion board, you will find that you can organize and display messages in different ways. Feel free to experiment with this; you won't break anything.