Logging in and accessing forgotten passwords

To login to Blackboard you're going to need to go to your institution's Blackboard homepage. It's usually Blackboard, dot, your institution's name, dot, edu, like blackboard.princeton.edu, or courses, dot your institution's name, dot edu. If that doesn't work, check for a link to Blackboard on your institution's website or student portal. You can also search Google for the name of your institution and the word Blackboard. Your institution's Blackboard login page probably looks completely different than what you see here.

That's okay. Logging in is logging in. What you do is you key in your username and your password or you look for a Login button. Most institutions assign you a username and password. If you cannot remember your username you've got to check with your institution's helpdesk. You can usually find a link to the helpdesk on your institution's website. Another way is by searching the web for your institution's name, the word Blackboard, and the word help. If you cannot remember your password, see if your institution's Blackboard login page has a Forgot Your Password link and you can click on that.

Don't be surprised though if you don't see this. Many institutions actually turned that tool off and require you to go through the helpdesk. If you are in primary or secondary school, kindergarten through 12th grade here in the States, you may also consider checking with your teacher. Your elementary middle school or high school teacher may have the ability to reset Blackboard passwords or even create new accounts. However, if you are in college, do not contact your instructor about your password. Your instructor can't help you.

One word of warning about your password: keep it safe and do not share it with anyone else. If you share your password with someone else, that person will be able to log in to your account, see your individual assignment and course grades, and even submit bogus homework assignments. This could hurt your grades. Once you've entered your correct username and password, I'll type mine in, click the Enter or Return key on your keyboard or click the Login button. There are two common problems you may encounter when you try to log in to Blackboard. The first one is that you have an incorrect username.

In fact, I'm going to type my username here and I'll actually just add some garbage here. Now I'll type my correct password. What you're going to see is that Blackboard is going to throw up a message saying an error occurred while the system was processing this login request. By default Blackboard's usernames are not case-sensitive. You can type them in uppercase or lowercase or mixed case. However, some campuses usernames are case-sensitive. The solution to this error almost always is just to retype your name. If I type Crispen and my correct password I can get in.

The second type of error you can get is if your username is correct, but your password is incorrect. Let me actually type in the incorrect password here, and I click on Login. I'm going to get a different type of error message here. It's going to say Could not login. Valid authentication credentials were not provided. That always means it is a password issue, and it almost always means that your Caps Lock on your keyboard is on. If I type in the correct password I can get in successfully. How do you log out of Blackboard? Well, the top right hand corner there's this button that says Logout.

If you click on Logout, you're logged out of the system. However, you have to click the Logout button and close your web browser.