Blackboard (Portal): Learning Management System for Course Websites at the CIRHR - Instructor Information

• Provide students with an integrated learning environment with places for the syllabus, assignments, readings, quizzes, grades.
• Communicate with individual students, study groups, class sections via email or the Announcement utility.
• Use electronic teaching tools in the Virtual Classroom, whiteboard, chat, discussion groups.
• Build modules with the Building Block tools and integrate them with the Learning System.

Please go to the Portal information and help website.

UTORid: To login you will need your UTORid

• New CIRHR Instructors: If you are a new CIRHR instructor, you will receive your UTORid in the "Getting on-line at U of T" letter as soon as the hiring process has been completed. Follow the instructions in the letter to activiate your UTORid.
• Returning CIRHR Instructors: Your UTORid is what you use to login to your UTORmail account (@utoronto.ca).
• If you have a TCard, but not a UTORid, you can create a UTORid.
• For questions contact Carol Canzano-Hamala at c.canzano@utoronto.ca, 416-978-0551.

Login

Go to the Blackboard Welcome page, click on Log-in to the Portal icon and enter your UTORid and password. The Log-in to the Portal icon is also on the UofT Homepage under Resources / Portal.

Care should be taken if using the Blackboard Gradebook to handle student grades. The current version of Blackboard allows grades to be entered as letters as well as numbers, but the default conversion between the two does not match School of Graduate Studies equivalencies. For example, an entered B+ will be handled internally as 87.5%, a C as 75%, and an A- as 92.5%. Because the default scheme is linear, and our scheme is not (our B range is from 70 to 79%, whereas our A range is from 80 to 100%) serious errors can arise also when final grades are calculated if letter grades have been used for entry.

Though the correct equivalencies can be programmed, we strongly recommend that IF THE GRADEBOOK IS USED, ONLY NUMERIC GRADES be used both at entry and in reporting . Conversion to letter grades should be done BY HAND, only after the final mark is calculated, before submission to SGS via the department (note that letter grades are required reporting for graduate students, whereas numeric grades are the norm for undergraduates in graduate courses).

This problem has been brought to the attention of the Blackboard group, but it seems not to be fixable within the current version.

• Please go to the Portal information and help website.
• If you don't see your course link, contact Carol Canzano, c.canzano@utoronto.ca, 416-978-0551.