Hello and welcome to online learning at the San Diego Community College District. What you see in front view here is a sample course. in our new course management system, Blackboard Learn 9.1 What we're going to do in this tutorial. is show you a little bit about the structure of a course in this system and how to navigate it. You'll notice immediately that you have two main areas on the screen here, a navigation menu on the left side and a larger content frame on the right. Obviously, course content and other content is going to appear over here on the right. Let's take a look at the menu first. We start off ,as most courses do, in the announcements tool. These are, just what the name suggests, announcements that your instructor will send to you with important information These announcementa are visible to everyone in the class. and will remain visible for varying lentgths of time depending upon the instructors decision. Next on the menu we have a syllabus link. Which takes us to a folder containing your course syllabus. A sample of which you see here. Generally this is the first thing you want to do when you enter a new course right after reading any announcements. to read the syllabus. The syllabus is a compact between you and the instructor which tells you exactly what you need to do to get an "A" in the course. Next, here on the navigation menu we have the course content link. These menu items may vary from course to course and they may be in a different order, so don't be confused by that. This course content area contains a number of items. some of which are files themselves like this greetings file here. Which is just a little text greeting in this case but might be a an audio or video greeting as well. then another link to the syllabus. Then we have folders containing other files, ,sample lessons, and so on. A link to our 24/7 helpdesk which you can access any time of the day or night. via a 800 number. which. you can call as often as you like and talk to a real person. The bulk of your course. information, your course documents and an so on will probably be in a content area like this. The learning modules linkl here, which may or may not be visible in your course gives you direct access to content grouped in what are called Learning Modules. Let's take a look at what a Learning Module is and does. A Learning Module is just a collection of documents and links to other items in the course presented to you in the order that the instructor feels you should access them. For instance, the first item here in this particular Learning Module is a a training tutorial that shows you how to troubleshoot difficulties in opening files in a Blackboard course, if you're having anything like that. this red bar here just indicates that this file is stored somewhere other than the blackboard server, in this case on a web server, another Webster. Then you can just work your way through the learning module in this manner. and access the information provided therein. There are also links typically llinks in learning modules to things like discussion boards, homework assignments, assessments or tests and so on. The calendar tool in the left menu is self explanatory. It's simply an events calendar for your course. The mail tool is an internal email system. that you can use to communicate with your instructor or fellow students. very simply. it works very much like any other email system except that you cannot send e mail outside blackboard and other people cannot send email in. Only you ,your classmates, and your instructor have access to this system and can communicate thereby. These. assessment and assignment links may or may not be present and they simply show you the list of the tests and homework assignments available in your course, or these may be provided to you through learning models or through content folders. The same for the discussions link. This, if present, will give you access to your discussion boards which you may also access through the learning models or through content folders. Discussion boards are simply bulletin boards. You post messages on the bulletin board; Everyone can see them. Everyone can reply to them, and you can see the replies. You can see messages posted by other students and by your instructor. It's an open discussion forum and very useful therein. You may have several discussion forums with the course, and your instructor may or may not decide grade those. The Chat tool, if present, is simply a is simply a real time text chat tool which will allow you to communicate with your instructor and or your classmates in real time. Your instructor may or may not use this tool in a class. Finally, the my grades tool will allow you to see your grades as you progress through the course. As we've seen, content may be. organized in Learning Modules, as the sample lessons here indicate. For instance, topic one that we saw before is, in fact, a learning module. Or... content may be simply presented in content folders in your content frame here. In each folder there may be a number of files. Your instructor's syllabus will explain the organization of content within your course. remember that you can always get help by clicking on the help button at the top of the screen which will take you to our our 24/7 helpdesk. Note that you can always navigate from place to place within the course using the course menus and the breadcrumbs at the top of the screen. For instance, I can go back to sample lessons by clicking here and back to the course content area by clicking that breadcrumb. It is also possible, in most cases. to use the back button on the web browser but that may or may not work some of the time. So you will always have the menu and the breadcrumbs to fall back on. We hope you'll find Blackboard Learn 9.1 a pleasant and effective learning environment!