Customizing Your Blackboard Course

Course titles / names for are automatically set by the connection to MyNIU. For current courses, that connection overwrites any changes you make every time that the servers sync. Although it may appear that you are able to change the course title or name, those changes will revert back to the original name within 24 hours.

You can change the name for shells or for past courses. Those are not managed by the sync with MyNIU.

For current courses, if you want to make certain courses easier to find in your course list, you can mark them as Favorites by clicking the star icon. For combined courses, we recommend clearly communicating with your students that they may be accessing a course or section that is different from the one they are registered for.

To upload a banner into a Blackboard course, you need to have a properly-sized banner created. For Original Course View, banners should be no larger than 1000 x 150 pixels. For Ultra Course View, banners must be at least 1200 x 240 pixals; we recommend 4800 x 960 to ensure your image is crisp as the screen is resized. Banners must be created and sized outside Blackboard and should be uploaded as a .png or .jpg file.

To add a banner in Original Course View:

1. Go to the Control Panel and click Customization, then select Teaching Style
2. In the adjacent window, scroll down to Section No. 7, Select Banner
3. Click the Browse My Computer button and select the banner image that is stored on the computer
4. Click Submit

To add a banner in Ultra Course View:

1. Click the Edit display settings link under the Course Image heading in the Details & Actions panel
2. Click the Upload new image button
3. Find and select your image
4. Drag the image and the zoom sliders to select the view you would like to be visible
5. Click the slider in the upper right to enable the image as your course banner (otherwise, it will only be used as the course card image on the Courses page)
6. If there is important content in your image, add text to the Image description field
7. Click the Save button

Blackboard will accept a variety web-friendly image formats. It is recommended to use banner image files in either .jpg or .png format. For Original Course View, we recommend 1000 x 150 pixels, and for Ultra Course View we recommend 4800 x 960 pixels (1200 x 240 pixels is the minimum). 

Smartphone cameras are very good; you could take a photo yourself to use as a course banner. All NIU faculty, staff, and students have access to the Adobe Stock library for photography and can use them for projects related to the NIU (like teaching or research). If you would like to find royalty-free phtoos that are not copyrighted, try Pixabay.

You can also try generating an image with artificial intelligence using Adobe Express or Adobe Firefly.