As the costs of printing increases for both faculty and students, it is important to point out that Blackboard Learn offers a number of tools that will allow your course to go nearly paper-free. Here are some ideas to help reduce the amount of paper that your course may use during the term:

Post Your Syllabus, Course Schedule, and Other Important Course Documents as Files in Blackboard Learn: If you want your students to have a paper copy of your syllabus, particularly on the first day of classes, that is a way for you to orient your students to the class. However, what if a student loses your syllabus or changes are needed? Instead of printing new copies, having an electronic copy of your syllabus or other course documents online will make those easily accessible to your students so they can access them on demand.

Additional Readings or Online Presentations? If you find an article online that you want your students to read, or if you want students to review a presentation you’ve created, you can add those to Blackboard. Blackboard will allow you to post hyperlinks to online resources, such as journal articles, publicly available e-books, or other materials. Additionally, if you save presentations online using a tool such as Slideshare, or you utilize online tools such as Prezi, you can also create hyperlinks to those as well.

Collect Assignments in Blackboard: Using an Assignment or a SafeAssignment will allow your students to submit their work to you electronically. You can also control when students submit their work by setting time and date restrictions on when work can be turned in. With an Assignment, you can allow students to submit multiple documents to you all at once. A SafeAssignment only allows one document to be uploaded at a time, but SafeAssignments include a check for potential plagiarism. You can also add comments to student papers and upload those modified papers to Blackboard for student review.

Student Journals: If you require your students to keep a personal journal of what they are learning or experiencing in your class, you can create an electronic journal in Blackboard. Students can type their journal entries into Blackboard, and it will only be available to you and that student. The benefit to this is that you will not have to collect notebooks from your students on a regular basis.

Blackboard Learn can serve as a great way for you to reduce the amount of paper you use in your class, and to also make course documents available at all times to your students. If you are interested in utilizing these tools in your class and would like assistance, please contact us at tlt-consulting@lists.purdue.edu .

Brett Creech
Educational Technologist