Announcements are an effective way to communicate with all your students via single message. This is particularly true of courses that require students to visit Blackboard regularly.
Availability
Announcements are found in both Classic- and Ultra-style Blackboard course sites.
How It Works
- New announcements appear when a student first visits the course site, regardless of course style or when students enroll/join. Old announcements are collected on an Announcements page, which is the default home page for classic-style course sites.
- Announcements also appear in a student's activity stream and are collected in the Daily Notifications email that goes out at 11PM every day.
- Display-after and display-until date settings can be used to limit the availability window of your announcements, if you want to write them in advance and schedule them for future release and / or do not want them to continue to be visible.
You cannot schedule an announcement for future release AND set it to email to all students upon publication.
Use Cases
Faculty use announcements to notify students of upcoming assignments, clarify instructions, or communicate changes to the class schedule. An excellent way to keep students engaged, particularly in an online course, is to post a weekly announcement that summarizes the previous week's activity ("In last week's discussion a few people brought up some interesting points ...") and sets expectations for the upcoming week ("Pay particular attention to ...").