General Academic Courses (automatically created by SAP/SLCM)
Being familiar with the way in which Blackboard identifies courses can help instructors locate a particular course and is also useful to know when copying course materials forward each term:
- Each Blackboard course shell has a specific course ID in the form: AAA111-YYSSS-11111111
- The first portion of the ID, "AAA111" is the course designator. Example: CPS100
- The second portion of the ID, "YYSSS" denotes the year and semester the course is offered.
The first two digits represent the academic year, while the last three digits represent semesters: fall (300), spring (500), and summer (700). The trickiest part is to remember that Fall is the first semester of each new academic year. Example: 22300 is a course that will begin in August 2021.
- The final portion of the ID, "22311111" denotes the 8-digit Event Package Number (EPN). Example: 22008430
- Many suffixes will also be at the end of the course ID. ex WEB, HYBR, CR, LAB
- Putting all of the examples together, we get CPS100-20300-22008430. Therefore, this particular section of CPS100 (22008430) is offered in the Fall semester of 2019--not 2020 as one might expect, since Fall is the start of the 2019/2020 academic year.
A few more examples are provided:
- A Spring course beginning January 2022: ENG101-22500-22213456
- A Summer course beginning May 2022: ENG101-22700-22213456
- A Fall course beginning August 2022: ENG101-23300-22213456
Special Purpose Courses
The following information pertains to courses manually created by the Help Desk and/or Blackboard Administrators and NOT by the automatic SAP SLCM snapshot process:
- A "-MMYY" (ex. -0321) at the end of a course ID indicates the month and year where a course may be considered for purge (March of the year 2021).
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. How can I determine what the course ID is in Blackboard?
A1. To quickly find the full course ID, click Control Panel > Customization > Properties. The course name field will be shown first, followed by the Course ID.
Q2. Can the course ID be modified?
A2. No, course ID's may not be modified, regardless of whether the course is created automatically through the snapshot process or if manually created. Instructors do have the ability to change the Course Name or Title of a course they are teaching. This can be done through Control Panel > Customization > Properties.