What is a Merged Course? (Ultra Course View)
A merged course is a Blackboard course site in which two (or more) separate course sections have been merged into one Blackboard course site. This guide will demonstrate how to navigate and identify merged courses in the Ultra Course View.
Information about Merged Courses
Merged courses allow faculty members to combine multiple sections of a course into a single Blackboard course 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, UToledo'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 UToledo Online Faculty Support at [email protected] with the course sections you would like to have merged.
Identifying Merged Courses in the Course Menu
Instructors will see the MERGED course, which will include (MERGED) in the course title.
Working with Merged Courses
Within the merged course, you will see the title of the course at the top of the course menu as "Year:Term," "Course Alphanumeric ID" (Merged) "Course Name." e.g. 2014:4 Fall, MATH4980 (Merged) Special Topics.
The merged course becomes the master course and you will not have access to the child courses in the Ultra Course View.
Identifying Students in a Merged Course
This is an area in which Blackboard Ultra Course View works differently than Original. In Original, the Grade Center provided a Child Course ID column. This feature does not yet exist in Ultra. You can, however, see a smart view of a child section in the Ultra Gradebook.
1. Select the Gradebook tab in Ultra Course View.
2. Select the Grades view.
3. Click the Filter button to expand the Filters options.
1. Select the section of students you want to see. This will not differentiate sections if you choose more than one, so if you wish to see students by particular section, you'd need to do these one at a time.
2. Click apply to see the specific list of students by selection.
Repeat the above steps for each section you'd like to view. Uncheck all boxes and click apply to return to full view of Gradebook.
As an alternate workaround, you could create manual Groups in Ultra for quick views of child course groups.