Viewing your roster

How can you view a roster of everyone enrolled in your Blackboard course? Well, the first thing you need to do is get into the Blackboard course itself. I'm going to click under My Courses and click on the name of the course. Then I'm going to scroll down. Now, I've seen a lot of instructors go and click on Tools and then scroll down and click on Roster. This is actually a bad idea. This is meant for students, not instructors. In fact, when I get in here, it's going to say that there are no users in my course--my course is empty! No, it's not empty. In fact, it just did a sort, and the sort was saying First Name contains nothing.

That's why it says No Users. But if, I go First Name, Not blank and click on Go, it's going to show me my complete roster. But notice it only shows me my Last Name and my First Name. Now, I can sort by Last Name, Last Name, First Name. I have the ability to do sorting. It's okay, but there's a much more powerful roster built into the Course Management area of your course over in the bottom left-hand side of the page. So I'm going to go under Course Management, click on Users and Groups, and I am going to click on Users.

Now, in Blackboard 9.1, your roster should automatically come up. If it doesn't, choose Username or any of these pulldown lists, but you just want to make the second one Not blank. Not blank will then give you a complete and total list of everybody enrolled in your course. If you're running Blackboard 9.0, not 9.1, Not blank is going to say 'I can't let you do a Not blank search'. So instead, type a Percent sign. The Percent sign is a hack from some colleagues of mine at the University of Texas.

It's a wildcard character. And if you do a search for username not blank or anything with a Percent sign click on Go, it gives you the full roster. I want you to notice here, this gives you the username, gives you the first name, gives you the last name, gives you the email address, gives you the role, gives you whether or not they can get into the course--that's what Available means. You have the entire ability to see your entire course roster. Sometimes you might have multiple pages of students in your course. Down in the right-hand side, you'll see Edit Paging, and you can choose how many items to show up on the page.

In this case, we're going to choose all 19, but if I were saying I only want to see 10 at a time, click on Go, it'll show me that I'm on page 1 of page 2 and go to 2nd page and that will show me the entire roster. Or I can just go down and click on Show All. Show All will show me the entire roster. Now you may or may not be able to enroll users in your course; many institutions disable this feature. We'll talk a little more about this later on. My recommendation is don't enroll users in your course.

Your institution is very likely going to enroll and un-enroll people into your course for you. That's why you may not even see an Enroll User button in the top left-hand corner. So I've got this great list. It's actually sortable, but how do print this out? How do I save this? How do I carry it along with me? And the answer is you can't. You can't really save this. You can print this basically, if you right-click on it, and then you can actually say Print or this frame and just print that frame, but there's a much better way to download this information, and that involves downloading your Grade Center.

We'll talk about that in the next movie. But for now, if you needed to go and check to see who is enrolled in your course right now, click on the name of your course--don't click on Roster under Tools--scroll down under Users and Groups, click on Users, and you should see a list of users. If not, you can choose Username Not blank and then percentage will also give you a list of users. Click on Go, and that shows you everybody in your roster.