Creating Terms Manually

To create a term, go to Admin Panel > Courses > Terms and click Create Term. Assign it a name and configure the options:

• Available controls whether the term and the courses assigned to it will be available or not (availability determines if students can access them)
• Duration controls the dates during which the term (and the courses within it) will be available. Using Continuous creates a term that is always open.

The availability of courses is delegated to the courses themselves (so it can be controlled via the course Properties instead of using the term’s availability). For the courses’ availability to update according to the term’s availability, the courses must have both availability and duration set to follow the term:

To finish, click Submit.

Creating Terms Using a Data Integration

Using the integration capabilities of Blackboard, you can create terms and associate courses with them. To do this, you need to create a data integration that receives information from external systems, which are responsible for delivering a file with the necessary information to the corresponding endpoint. In this article, you can see where to locate the integration endpoints.

These are the minimum data fields to send in an example term creation file, with the option to add multiple columns with other data, which can be viewed here: Snapshot Flat File Header Description

• EXTERNAL_TERM_KEY
• NAME
• DATA_SOURCE_KEY: if not specified in the file, it will be specified in the data integration configuration.

Here is an example of the contents of an integration file with the minimum fields needed to create terms:

EXTERNAL_TERM_KEY|NAME
2024SPRING|Spring 2024
2025AUTUMN|Fall 2025

You can also upload files directly to the integration if you need to do so manually on occasion. Prepare your file in a text editor and save it as UTF-8 with BOM. Follow the instructions to upload files manually, and be sure to select the correct endpoint, Term, and Store.