Tips for Starting the Semester with Blackboard

The following list of reminders and links can help answer frequently asked questions new faculty, teaching staff, and TAs may have, as they request course space and get ready to develop their courses in Blackboard:

New Features in the Ultra Course View

Many new features have been added to Ultra Course View recently (like multi-column layouts in Ultra Documents, the ability to convert a Word, PDF, or PPT to an Ultra Document, Jumbled Sentence question type for Tests, text-based Gradebook items, an indicator for whether students have viewed grading feedback, and more!). Check out more features in our monthly update videos.

AI Design Assistant - Streamline Course Building but Remain in Control

The AI Design Assistant is available to anyone with the Instructor or Teaching Assistant role in a course. The AI Design Assistant gives you a head start on some of the more time consuming aspects of building a course in Blackboard. Some of the tasks it can help with include building the structure of your course with Learning Modules; suggesting authentic prompts for Assignments, Discussions, and Journals; writing Test questions; creating Rubrics; generating images for Learning Modules and Ultra Documents; and (as of 8/13/25) improving the design of Ultra Documents.  

You are always in control with the AI Design Assistant. The AI does not use your course data or prompts for training purposes, and it does not access your course content until you use the tool (AI is not reviewing your course in the background). You must review the content and accept it before it is added to your course. Once added to your course, you can edit or delete any AI-generated material. 

Requesting a new course on Blackboard 

Your courses are not automatically listed in Blackboard; you must request your courses to be able to build them.

After logging into webcourses.niu.edu, click the Tools tab at the left of the page, followed by Blackboard Faculty Tools. Click My Courses and then follow the prompts to request your upcoming courses. (Instructions and step-by-step tutorials for requesting your course are also available.) To request a Blackboard course, you must be the "instructor of record" for the course in the MyNIU system. If you do not see a course listed to request, verify that you are listed as instructor of record in MyNIU (reach out to your department if you do not see the course in MyNIU). Note that it may take up to 24 hours after being listed as instructor of record in MyNIU to be able to request the course in Blackboard.

Those teaching multiple sections together (e.g. undergraduate/graduate courses taught together, Honors mini-sections, or cross-listed courses) may want to combine their sections into a single Blackboard course. You must be instructor of record for both sections to be able to combine the courses. The resulting Primary course will include the students from all combined sections and will be identified with "PRIM" in the course name.

Course requests are processed immediately. You may need to refresh the Courses page several times to see the course.

Accessing your courses

You can access all your courses from the current and previous semesters by clicking Courses on the left of the page. Use the search and filters to find the course you are looking for. Note that you may need to remove existing filters, such as Current Courses, because fall courses are considered Upcoming Courses until the start date. For quick and convenient access, you can favorite the courses you use most frequently by clicking the star icon. Learn more about the Courses page.

Open your course with confidence and welcome students 

We recommend making your course available to students a few days early with a welcome message, to help them anticipate the structure and expectations of the course. Your course may open automatically at the date you specified when you requested your course in Blackboard, or you can open it manually if you did not set a date. The Course Availability Settings tool, custom-built by the Division of IT, will tell you definitively whether your course is open to students and let you modify any of the availability settings, including the start date of the course.

Adding an image and name pronunciation to your profile

Did you know you can customize your profile in Blackboard to include a profile image and your name pronunciation? This easy step can help students feel more connected to you. Your profile image appears on the Course Content page and in Messages; both your image and name pronunciation appear on the Roster and in Discussions. Students can also customize their profile with an image and name pronunciation, which are visible to their classmates. 

Customizing email notifications

The most essential information from across your courses, like new materials, discussion posts or replies, assignment and test submissions, or grades will be automatically emailed to you daily as a digest each night. You will only receive the daily digest email if there was activity in at least one of your courses. You can modify your notification settings to determine what you see in the daily digest emails from your profile or by clicking the gear icon in the upper right of the Activity Stream. Uncheck any notification you do not wish to receive; uncheck all the items on the email tab to stop receiving the Daily Digest emails. Learn more about the Activity Stream and Notifications.

Learn more about Blackboard

The Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning regularly hosts workshops on using Blackboard for teaching purposes. Faculty, Instructors, and Teaching Assistants receive the program schedule via email each month, or you can view the list of upcoming programs on our website. 

For those who cannot attend any of the scheduled sessions, CITL has created a self-paced workshop on the Ultra Course View.  

The Teaching and Learning with Blackboard site contains instructions, tutorials, and other helpful information related to using Blackboard for your courses, including answers to Frequently Asked Questions.

For login and password-related questions, please contact the IT Service Desk at 815-753-8100 or ServiceDesk@niu.edu, or use the Division of IT Self-Service system to submit a ticket. For other teaching-related Blackboard questions, faculty can submit questions at niu.edu/blackboard/ask.