There are a couple of course roles available in Blackboard. I’ll do my best to explain them and how they come to pass at USF.
The most privileged role is called Instructor. The Instructor role has full access to the course in Blackboard. They can change the roles(promote or demote) of other people in their course. They are listed as Instructors of courses in various Blackboard reports.
In general, Instructors are added to Blackboard courses automatically based on the information in Banner. Anyone who is assigned as an Instructor of Record (IOR) regardless of primary or not, will be added to that course as an Instructor in Blackboard. The IOR is important to Blackboard as anyone who is an IOR in Banner is also eligible to submit final grades to Banner via eGrades in Blackboard.
The other roles in Blackboard:
- Teaching Assistant(TA): This role has almost all the access to a course in Blackboard as the Instructor, but is not listed as an Instructor. This role can add and remove content, grades, assessments. The only thing this role cannot do is manually add students to the course in Blackboard, or change the roles of students in the course (promote a student to a TA or Builder for example). TA’s also cannot submit eGrades.
- Grader: This role has full access to exams and exam results, and to the Grade Center. This role cannot add or remove content.
- Builder: The contrapositive to the Grader. This role can add and remove content and exams. This role cannot view student exam submissions, nor can it access the Grade Center.
A Person cannot have more than one role. Generally speaking, the roles are additive, that is
Grader = grades
Builder = content
Grader + Builder = TA
TA + role change privilege = Instructor
These three roles along with the Instructor can be assigned to anyone in the course by another Instructor of the course. The roles in Blackboard do not directly correspond to Banner, so for example, if I made you an Instructor of my course in Blackboard, you would not necessarily be or need to be an Instructor in Banner. Said another way, Instructor assignments in Banner are reflected in Blackboard, but not vice versa.
As a basic explanation, anyone who has an account in Blackboard can be made an Instructor/TA/Grader/Builder/Student of a course in Blackboard. The person does not need to be in Banner. There are a few caveats
- If the person was an Instructor in Banner first, they are automatically added as Instructor in Blackboard and special steps need to be taken to override.
- If the person was a Student in Banner first, they are automatically added as Student in Blackboard and special steps need to be taken to override
Otherwise, anyone added to a course by someone else retains that role for as long as needed.
