Given general business continuity and disaster preparedness planning needs (particularly following Hurricane Ike), the college will be making an effort to ensure all courses have a Blackboard course site that includes at least the course syllabus and faculty contact information beginning with the coming fall semester.
Many faculty may need or want support and training to meet this goal. To support that need, the instructional design group has developed and tested with a number of faculty an online, computer based training resource to support the initiative. The training is delivered via a new, online professional development management system the college is currently implementing (Avatar). The training should normally take 30-45 minutes. To prepare to have the minimum required Blackboard presence for courses, faculty can complete the training at your earliest convenience. The attached documents explain how to access the training and the certificate of completion once finished.
Training is available to all full-time and adjunct faculty. Two notes regarding access to Avatar.
- Full time or existing adjunct faculty that do not teach on a 12 month contract are marked in Banner as inactive during the months they are not teaching; that causes those accounts to also be marked as inactive in Avatar which makes your account unavailable. As soon as your job status in Banner is changed back to Active for the fall semester, you will be able to access Avatar and the training.
- New adjunct faculty will be able to access the content once employment data has been entered into Banner by Human Resources and they have received their G#.
If neither of those conditions apply and you still experience problems logging into Avatar, please contact Tech Support for assistance at 281-998-6137.
