Information about Merged Courses
Merged courses allow faculty members to combine multiple sections of a course into a single site. This allows instructors to save time and effort related to uploading content, as they only need to upload content to one site. In addition, instructors can interact with students and grade students’ work in one site, instead of having to manage student interactions and grading across multiple sites. By default, courses that are crosslisted in Banner, UT’s student registration system, are automatically merged in Blackboard.
If you are teaching multiple sections of one course, you can request to have the sites merged by sending a request to UT Online Faculty Support at callcenter@mhc.ab.ca with the course sections you would like to have merged.
Identifying Merged Courses in the Course Menu
Merged courses in Blackboard consist of two components: One master course and a ‘child’ course for each section that has been merged into one site. In your Blackboard course menu, a merged course will be indicated by the the following format: “Year:Term,” “Course IDST ID” (Merged) “Course Name.” e.g. 2021 Fall, IDST980 (Merged). In addition to the merged master site, you will also see the individual child courses listed in the menu with their course name and ID numbers. Below the course name, you will see the following text: (unavailable child course), indicating that the course is a child
course of a merged section.
1. Master Class
2. Child Course
Working with Merged Courses
If you access one of the child courses that feed into the master course site, you will see the following message at the top of the screen: Unavailable child course. Students will not see changes made to this course. Please work in master course. Click on the link provided to access the master course.
Within the master course, you will see the title of the course at the top of the course menu as the name of the course “IDST 2021FALL,” “Course IDST ID” (Merged) “Course Name.” e.g. 2021 Fall, IDST980 (Merged) Special Topics. In addition, the master course has its own unique course ID, which can be accessed under the Content Collection. This merged ID can be used for copying materials from a previous course into the current course.
1. Banner appears to inform you that you are working in the Child Course
Identifying Students in a Merged Course
Within the Blackboard Grade Center, which can be accessed through the Control Panel>Grade Center>Full Grade Center, you will see a column labeled Child Course ID that indicates which child course the user belongs to.
Instructors can create Smart Views in the Grade Center in order to view students within an individual section.
In addition, this information can be found under Control Panel>Users and Groups>Users under the column labeled Child Course ID.