Your Course through a Test Student’s Eyes

Ever wonder how your course looks and feels to a student?   In Blackboard, the method we recommend to do exactly this is called viewing as a “Test Student”.  The Test Student is a “pseudo” student account that you can add to the course with its own login credentials.  It probably is a bit cumbersome to have a whole separate account and password just to check your exam set-up, for instance, but you can then take that exam exactly as a student would to make sure everything is working properly.  And once you have set up the Test Student, you can add the Test Student to all of your sections under one set of credentials. It carries over from semester to semester, too. Bonus: you can re-set the password in the same place that you set up the account.

Tutorial: How to Set Up a Test Student

As designers, we find the Test Student invaluable. We use it all of the time to make sure that “technically” things are working as we think they should, but the Test Student allows us to look at the course empathically, as well.  For example, when you look at your course as a “Test Student” are you forced to scroll through various items before landing on the latest assignment or reading? If so, consider putting similar items into content folders. Here is an example:

Content area with folders

Example of Content Area with Folders

Alternatively, try leveraging the course menu for quicker and obvious navigation.

Course menu tools

Example of Course Menu Tools

One common gripe we get is that the instructor has left off adding the My Grades tool to the course menu. Sure, maybe it’s under “Tools” that you may have set up in the menu, but the Tools area is usually a wasteland of unused tools no different than Uncle Joe’s overstuffed garage.  Why send students there? Instead, add frequently used tools front and center to the course menu to keep students from hunting around for content and information.

Tutorial: How to Add a Tool to the Course Menu

Another place where the Test Student comes in handy is in the use of Adaptive Release and/or manually enrolled Groups.  Add the Test Student whenever you need to check the set-up of these tricky yet powerful Blackboard tools.

Learn more about Adaptive Release

Tutorial: How to Create Groups

Finally, use the Test Student to confirm your Grade Center columns and calculations. This is particularly helpful if you have similarly named assignment columns that have been copied over semester after semester, but you aren’t using all of them in the final calculations. You can submit the assignment as the Test Student, and see where the Needs Grading indicator appears in the Grade Center for the correct columns. (I can’t tell you how many times we have used this trick.)  Now you can discard the unnecessary assignments and their respective columns.

Some of you out there may have discovered the “Student Preview” tool, which seems similar and can be helpful, but it takes a while to sync and it is puzzling deciding how to answer the questions about deleting work once you want to exit Preview Mode. Moreover, in some browsers Preview Mode DOES NOT look like the UH Blackboard template, so it is deceiving.

In summary, the Test Student really is worth investing a little time to get it set up, especially if you use it with the end-user, i.e., the REAL student, in mind.

 

 

Image: Apostle with Glasses is in the Public Domain.

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