Over the next few months, we are making the following changes to the course roles in Blackboard.
Additional Lecturer and Additional Tutor will no longer be available
(from June 2025).
Teaching staff should be added using the most appropriate role via Module Management (which will feed directly to Blackboard within an hour). Anyone with Additional Lecturer or Additional Tutor in previous years’ courses will keep their access but the roles won’t be available for new enrolments.
Departmental Administrators and External Examiners will be added to courses with the role of Facilitator
(from June 2025).
This will give the same access as before but will help us to make sure that students don’t see these colleagues as teaching members of staff. This should cut down on the possibility of students incorrectly contacting administrators and External Examiners. Note that both External Examiners and Department Administrators will be listed as Facilitators in the Course Register. You will be able to tell which is which because External Examiners don’t have an AU email address (@aber.ac.uk).
Some surplus roles have been removed
(from March 2025).
These were mainly roles created for system test purposes. However, if anyone was added with one of the deleted roles, they have been changed to Student. Any queries about enrolments should be sent to elearning@aber.ac.uk.
Staff with any role must be added to a course via Module Management
Any staff added manually will be removed from the course on the following Monday night. Student enrolments must be managed via the Student Record. New course enrolments are added within an hour of the change, and students are removed from old course enrolments on the following Monday night.
You shouldn’t notice too many differences, but it will improve some technical aspects of staff and student access to Blackboard courses.
These changes to course roles are designed to remove all course roles that have been created in-house at AU. This is because they don’t update as part of the Blackboard monthly updates. This means that course roles may not have the permission to use new tools or an up-to-date Welsh interface. Changing to using just the in-built Blackboard roles should improve access and bilingualism, as well as be more efficient. The only exception to this is the AU-created Course Viewer role which will remain. We have voted for the Blackboard Ideas Exchange entry for a built-in Course Viewer role, and we will make use of it if it is introduced.
Following our retention schedule, the removed roles will be finally deleted in 2030 when the last of the courses using them are removed from Blackboard.