Make a Course Available to Students

About course availability

A course must be made available before students enrolled in the course will be able to view or access the course and its content. However, you may want to make a course unavailable during the building process or after a scheduled course has finished.

If your course is unavailable, access is determined by course role. Blackboard administrators, instructors, course builders, teaching assistants, and graders can see and access unavailable courses from the My Courses tab and the course list, but they are marked as unavailable. Students cannot access unavailable courses regardless of the course duration. Unavailable courses do not appear in the course catalog.

Set course availability

Doesn't seem familiar? Jump to the "Ultra" help about setting course availability.

Below the course menu, set your course availability here:

Control Panel > Customization > Properties > Set Availability

1. In the Set Availability section, select Yes or No.
2. Optionally, when making a course available, you can choose one of the following options in the Set Course Duration section:
   • Continuous (default) to leave the course available without a specified start or end date.
   • Select Dates to choose a start and/or end date. The start and end times are set automatically. The start time is midnight and the end time is 11:59:59.
   • Days from the Date of Enrollment to specify a specific length of time users have to access the course after enrolling. This is the best option for self-paced courses.
3. Select Submit.

You can control when your course is private—or unavailable—to your students. For example, you may not want students to access your course during the building process.

Watch a video on how to make your course available

This tutorial shows you how to make your course available to students by changing the course properties.

Video: How to make a course available to students

ULTRA: Set course availability

Doesn't seem familiar? Jump to the "Original" help about setting course availability.

From base navigation, select the Courses link to access your course list. Point to a course card and use the lock icon to change your course availability. You can make your course private while you add or experiment with content, and then open it to students when you're ready. Students see private courses in their course lists, but they can't access them.

You can also change your course from private to open on the Course Content page.