Creating a Collaboration Session:

This guide will walk you through the process of creating a collaboration session in your Blackboard course. The components of a Collaboration session, Virtual Classroom and the Lightweight Chat, allow you and your students to participate in real-time, online classroom discussions and presentations. From this page you can access all of the collaboration sessions for the course, including those that have already taken place and are archived and those that are scheduled for the future. You can also schedule new collaboration sessions and make changes to those already scheduled from this page.

Step 1:  Click on the Control Panel link and click on Collaboration.

Step 2:  Click on the Collaboration Session button.

Step 3:  This will open a collaboration information page. You will see that the Session Name text box already has the field populated. It is recommended that you rename this field to something that you will recognize. For example, Chapter 1 would be an appropriate name if the topics that were going to be discussed are of Chapter 1 of the course.

Step 4: Select the availability time and dates as desired. To make the collaboration session available for the students, you must click Yes under the Available row.

Step 5: Choose the type of collaboration tool that you would like.  

·         The Virtual Classroom allows users to enter a real-time discussion with instructors, other students, and colleagues, access the Web, and engage in question and answer sessions.

·         Chat allows users to open just the chat function of the Virtual Classroom.

Step 6: Click on the Submit button.  You will then receive a confirmation page. This notifies you that your action was successful in creating the collaboration session.

Step 7: Click on the  button to close the confirmation page. You will then see the new collaboration session.

Step 8: Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the  button to complete the process of creating a collaboration session.