Adding a Folder to a Content Area

As we explain in the related help sheet, Adding a Content Item to Your Course, we recommend that you organize the Course Materials section (or other relevant sections) of your Blackboard course into folders, so that you can group related documents together and so that you can make it easier for students to find the relevant document(s) when needed. To add a folder to a content area:

1. Log in to Blackboard (opens in new window), and click on your course among the list of "Courses you are teaching" in the My Courses section of the opening page. Within that course, go to the Control Panel by clicking on the icon near the bottom of the left-hand navigation menu.
2. We'll assume in this help sheet that you want to create the folder in the Course Materials section of your course. Within the "Content Areas" section of the Control Panel for your course (in the top-left quadrant of the screen), click on the Course Materials link, which should be the second link in that section:

   

3. To add a folder, click the Folder button:

   

4. Type a name for the folder in the Name box.

   If you would like to color-code your folders to make them easier to identify, you can choose a color other than the default (black) by clicking the button and selecting the color you want from the "Color Picker" window that opens up.

   We recommend that you type a brief description of the folder in the Text box, so your students will have a sense of the files contained within it:

   

   The figure just above shows how the screen will appear in Internet Explorer. If you want to add special formatting to your text, we recommend that you type the text first without any formatting, then click and drag with your mouse to select the specific words that will need special formatting. Once those words are highlighted, click on the appropriate tool in the Formatting Toolbar (B or I, for example) to apply the chosen formatting to the selected text.

   Firefox users (for Blackboard version 6.3 and below) won't have the same WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text box with the special formatting toolbars. Instead, make sure that Smart Text is the option chosen at the bottom of the message text window. Smart Text automatically recognizes URLs as links, interprets returns as paragraph breaks, and accepts HTML code as well.

5. Scroll down to the Options section of the page. We strongly recommend that you click in the Yes button to make the content available. If you want to limit when students can see the folder (and therefore all the items contained in it as well), you can use the Display After and Display Until settings to control that time frame. Since this is a folder and not a content item, you don't really need to track how often students click on the folder, so you can leave the Track number of views option in its default "No" setting:

   

6. Click the button to send your changes to the server.

7. Blackboard will confirm that the item has been successfully added to your course. Click the button to return to the Course Materials section of your Blackboard course.

8. You should see the new folder listed, with its description. The folder may not be the first item on your page. If you'd like to re-order the items in this section of the course, you can click on the drop-down arrow (marked with a red arrow in the figure below) to choose a different order number for your item - with 1 being the first item, and subsequent items displayed below that:

   

   Please note that if you want to add documents within a folder, you need to click on the link for the folder first, so that you are actually adding the items within the folder (from Blackboard's perspective). See the related help sheet Adding a Content Item to Your Course for those instructions.

9. Click on the button to return to the Control Panel for your course.

Last revised June 8, 2006.  Please send questions or comments to itec@bucknell.edu.