Setting up Blackboard integration for Instructors

This article is for instructors who want Visible Body Courseware to appear in their Blackboard course. The benefit of this is that when students sign into the Blackboard course, they will be automatically signed in to Visible Body Courseware and Courseware will appear in the Blackboard navigation bar.

To start, your administrator will need to set up the tool in Blackboard using the administrator panel. 

Prerequisites

In order to successfully complete institutional setup, your administrator will need the secret and key supplied by Visible Body. If you don’t have a secret and key from a Visible Body representative, please request one. 

Watch this video or follow along with the steps below to begin setting up your Blackboard Courseware integration.

Step 1: Register Courseware as an LTI tool. (Administrator)

1. Log in to your Blackboard admin account and navigate to the “System Admin” page and then the “Administrator Panel” page. 
2. To add Courseware as a tool, navigate to “LTI Tool Providers” under the “Integrations” heading and select the “LTI Tool Providers” link.
3. On the “LTI Tool Providers” page, select “Register LTI 1.1 Provider” under the “LTI Tool Providers” heading text.
4. From the “Register Provider Domain” page, follow these steps:
• Under “Provider Domain Status”, navigate to the “Provider Domain” text field and enter “courseware.visiblebody.com” without quotes. 
• Next, make sure “Provider Domain Status” is set to the “Approved” option.
• In the “Secondary Hostnames” text field enter “courseware.visiblebody” on one line, then select enter to begin a new line and enter “visiblebody.com” on the second line.
• Navigate to the fields under the “Default Configuration” section. Set the “Default Configuration” option to “Set Globally”.
• In the “Tool Provider Key” field, enter your institution's key that was given to you by Visible Body.
• In the “Tool Provider Secret” field, enter your institution's secret that was given to you by Visible Body.
• In the “Tool Provider Custom Parameters” text field enter “blackboard_course_id=@X@course.pk_string@X@”. This custom parameter is used by Courseware to give a unique identifier to Blackboard courses for use in our system so that we can properly link a Blackboard course to a Courseware course.
• Next, move on to the fields under the “Institution Policies” section. Set the “Send User Data” option to “Send user data over any connection” or “Send user data only over SSL”, depending on your preference.
• Check off all boxes for the “User Fields to Send” option. These include “Role in Course”, “Name”, and “Email Address”. This allows us to bring over student information when they create their Courseware accounts.
• Next, set the Allow Membership Service Access option to “Yes” if that is your preference.
• Finally, at the bottom right corner of the web page, scroll all the way down and select the “Submit” button to register Courseware as an LTI Tool Provider. After submitting, you will be sent back to the LTI Tool Providers page.
  
  

Step 2: Manage placements (Administrator)

To manage the placement of the Courseware LTI Tool, select the dropdown arrow next to the “courseware.visiblebody.com” tool. Select the dropdown arrow and then select the “Manage Placements” button in the dropdown menu. 

1. You are now on the Manage Placements page for the “Courseware” tool. To create a new placement for our tool, select Create Placement under the Manage Placements: courseware.visiblebody.com heading.
2. Under the Placement Information heading, enter a title in the Label text field to give a name for Courseware in the Content section of the course. (We suggest using “Visible Body Courseware”. The name used in the label field is what students will see when they access Courseware from the Blackboard course.)
3. In the "Handle" text field enter “CW”.
4. Set the Availability option to Yes.
5. Set the Type option to Course Content Tool.
6. You can decide if you’d like Courseware to launch in a new window or stay within Blackboard. If you would prefer it to launch from within Blackboard, be sure “Launch in New Window” is not checked off.
7. Next, go to the fields under the “Tool Provider Information” section. For the “Tool Provider URL” text field enter “https://courseware.visiblebody.com/blackboard”.
8. “Tool Provider Key” and “Tool Provider Secret” should already be filled out with the key and secret you entered during the registration process.
9. Finally, at the bottom right corner of the web page, scroll all the way down and select the “Submit” button.

Courseware is now accessible in the institutions’ Blackboard instance and is ready to be added to instructors’ courses.

Step 3: Add Courseware to the Blackboard course. (Instructor or Administrator)

Instructor Set Up

Once you are logged into your Blackboard instructor account, navigate to the Blackboard Course you would like to link to Courseware. 

• Inside your Blackboard Course, select “Content” from the left navigation menu.
• On the Course Content page, select Build Content>“Courseware”, then enter “Visible Body Courseware” in the name field. “Permit Users to View this Content” should be checked. Then select “Submit” to add Visible Body Courseware to your course.

Step 4: Log in to Courseware and link your courses. (Instructor or Administrator)

In your Blackboard course, select “Courseware” from the Content area on the left. 

• Sign in to link your Blackboard and Courseware accounts. You won't be asked to log into Courseware again when accessing it through Blackboard, just log into Blackboard!
• Next you'll be prompted to link a course from Courseware with your Blackboard course. Just select your course from the dropdown, or if you want to create a new course, select "Create one" below.
• Look for the green confirmation message at the top of the screen to make sure your course has been linked successfully.
• Each time you visit Courseware through Blackboard, it will bring you right to your course.

Note: If you’ve linked the incorrect course and need to unlink your Courseware and Blackboard courses, follow the instructions here.

Some items to note:

• Import Courseware grades into Blackboard more effectively with the CSV export function in the gradebook. Now you can use the populated Username column to match up students before you import the grades.
• Blackboard Courseware integration is available for schools that have a group license and for courses in which students purchase their own subscription.
• You only need one secret and key for each instance of Blackboard. Most instructors at one campus can use the same secret and key to set up their courses. If your school has multiple campuses using different instances of Blackboard, you will need a secret and key for each. 
• If you make a master Blackboard course and make copies for other semesters or other instructors, you need to link to a unique Courseware course. The course syncing is 1:1.

Step 5: Invite your students

Now that your Blackboard and Courseware courses are linked your students are ready to get signed into Courseware through Blackboard. See this article for more explicit steps you can share with students!

1. Simply prompt your students to log into their Blackboard course and select “Content” in the left-hand navigation bar. 
2. They will then launch Courseware from the Content page.
3. Next, they’ll be prompted to create a new Courseware account or log in to their existing account. 
4. They will be brought right to the Courseware course you linked.

NOTE: DO NOT use the "Invite People" link in your Courseware course to invite students to your course. This feature does not work with the Blackboard-Courseware integration.

Unlink your Courseware and Blackboard courses

If you've accidentally linked the wrong Courseware course to your Blackboard course or vice versa, you can follow these steps to unlink your courses.

1. On the LMS Integration page, navigate to the Blackboard subsection. You will see the listing of courses that are linked. 
2. Check off the radio button next to the pairing you want to unlink. 
3. Select the “Unlink Course” button, and confirm you want to unlink these courses by selecting “OK” in the pop-up. You will see a green confirmation message at the top of the screen that these two courses are now unlinked. Note: you can only unlink one set of courses at a time.

Now that your courses are unlinked, you may link a new Courseware course to your Blackboard course with the instructions here.