As well as having a NILE course for each of your modules, your programme has its own NILE course too. For the 20/21 academic year we have been working with colleagues in IT Services to make improvements to the way that programme courses are created in NILE, which will make the process of finding and using programme courses much easier.

During the 19/20 academic year, 3,410 programme courses were created in NILE. Of these, only 6% were actually used, and the story is the same in previous academic years. The reason for this very low take up of programme courses is actually due to the way that NILE automatically creates a large number of programme course variations based around year and mode of study. For example, when trying to find the 19/20 programme course for History, you’ll be faced with the following list:

• CBAAHISTY-1920: 19/20 BA History
• CBAAHISTY-1FT-1920: 19/20 BA History Stage 1 FT
• CBAAHISTY-1PT-1920: 19/20 BA History Stage 1 PT
• CBAAHISTY-2FT-1920: 19/20 BA History Stage 2 FT
• CBAAHISTY-2PT-1920: 19/20 BA History Stage 2 PT
• CBAAHISTY-3FT-1920: 19/20 BA History Stage 3 FT
• CBAAHISTY-3PT-1920: 19/20 BA History Stage 3 PT
• SUBHIST-1920: 19/20 History

The end result here is that it is often difficult to know which of these programme courses is the best one to use. Additionally, the most requested type of programme course (i.e., the one with all of your students on it) is not actually in the above list because it is not automatically created; rather it has to be generated manually by merging multiple programme courses together.

The good news is that earlier in the year, SEC (Student Experience Committee) approved a proposal to improve and simplify the creation of programme courses in NILE, the result being that your programme now has only one NILE course, and all of your students are automatically enrolled on it.

To return to the above example, there is now only one programme course in NILE for History this academic year.

• CBAAHISTY-2021: 20/21 BA History

This course contains all single and joint honours students; first, second and third year students; full-time and part-time students: in fact, anybody and everybody studying History at UON during the 20/21 academic year.

But this doesn’t mean that programme courses now have to be one-size-fits-all affairs. While you can use the new programme courses to communicate easily with and create activities and resources for all your students at once, you can also use the groups and adaptive/conditional release tools in Blackboard to communicate with and create activities and resources for specific groups of students.

More information

If you have any questions about finding and using your programme course, or about how to set up groups in your course and release content to or communicate with specific groups of students, please do get in touch with your learning technologist.