Creating Terms Manually

To create a term, go to Admin Panel > Courses > Terms and click Create Term. Assign it a name and type (Annual, Quarterly, etc.).

If you want to nest terms, you can choose a main term to act as the parent of the one you are creating.

Then, further down, configure the options:

• Available controls whether the term and the courses assigned to it will be available or unavailable (availability determines whether 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.

Course availability is managed by the courses themselves (so you can control it via the course Properties instead of using the term availability). For course availability to update with the term’s availability, courses must have both availability and duration configured to match the term:

Finally, click Submit.

Creating Terms Using a Data Integration

Using Blackboard integration capabilities, you can create terms and associate courses with them. For 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 find the endpoints for integrations.

These are the minimum data fields to send in an example term creation file, and you can add multiple columns with other data, which can be seen 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 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 choose the correct endpoint, Term, and Store.