If you taught with a Blended Teaching textbook last term and you want to run the same textbook again, this guide is for you. It takes a couple of minutes from start to finish.
Open your textbook
Create a new version of it
Get your student link
Share the link with your students
1. Open Your Textbook
Everything you do as an instructor happens in the Control Center. It is the website where you manage your textbook: your content, your dates, your students and their grades. Students never see it.
Go to educators.blended-teaching.com and click Log In. Sign in with the email address your textbook was set up with.
You land on your dashboard, which lists every course you have. Your courses are grouped into My Active Courses, Upcoming Courses and Past Courses.
Find the textbook you taught with last term and click it. Once its end date has passed it sits under Past Courses, further down the page and shown in grey, so scroll down if you do not see it at the top.
You are now in the Control Center for that textbook, with its menu down the left-hand side: Dashboard, Student Progress, Gradebook, Course Structure, Students, Assessments and Settings. You will use Settings and Course Structure in this guide.
2. Create a New Version of Your Textbook
To teach with this textbook again, you make a new version of it. There are three good reasons to do this rather than carry on with the old one:
Your new class starts with a clean slate, so last term's results do not mix into this term's progress and grades.
You can make improvements for the new term without touching the record of the class you have already taught.
Your dates, your academic period and your student list all belong to the new term.
To make a new version:
In the Control Center of the textbook you are reusing, go to the Settings page.
Scroll down to the Course Actions box, find the Create New Version row, and click Create Version.
Review the Version Name and change it if you want to. We recommend it matches the name of your class.
Review the Internal Name. This one is entirely up to you and students never see it.
You can leave Course Code and Section Number blank. They are optional, and nothing in this guide depends on them.
Set the Start Date and End Date for this version. These cannot overlap with your previous version. The Start Date should be the day you want students to be able to open the textbook, which is usually shortly before teaching begins.
Select an Academic Period.
Click the blue Create Version button at the bottom of the box.
Your new version is now ready, with all of your content copied across, and you are taken straight into it.
A new version replaces the current one. Only one version of a textbook is live at a time, which is why the dates cannot overlap. From the Start Date onwards, the new version takes over and students from the previous version no longer have access. That is exactly what you want for a new term. If instead you need a second textbook running at the same time as your current one, because you are teaching another group alongside it, see A Guide to Teaching Multiple Sections.
3. Get Your Student Link
Your students need one address, and it is the front page of your textbook as they see it. You get it from Student View, a button that opens your textbook exactly as it looks to a student. It sits above your list of modules on the Course Structure page.
In the Control Center for your new version, go to Course Structure in the left-hand menu.
Click Student View. Your textbook opens on the student site, on its main page. This is the page your students land on, listing every module and chapter in your course.
Copy the address from your browser's address bar. It looks like https://library.blended-teaching.com/classbook/your-textbook-name.
If the address has extra text after a question mark, such as ?educatorPreview=1, you can delete everything from the question mark onwards. It does nothing for students, and the link is tidier without it.
This link stays the same every term. A new version keeps the same student address as the version before it, and from your Start Date onwards that address opens the new version automatically. So if you gave this link to a previous class, it is the same link again this term, and any Blended Teaching links you have already put on your module page keep working with nothing to change.
4. Share the Link With Your Students
Put the link wherever your students look first: your module page in Moodle or Blackboard, the module handbook, a welcome email, or a slide in your opening lecture.
Share it on or after the Start Date you set. Before that date the link still belongs to your previous version, so a new student following it early will not be able to get in.
Here is what happens when a student opens the link:
They land on the front page of your textbook and can see how the course is laid out.
When they open a video or a chapter, they are asked to create an account using their university email address, or to log in if they already have one.
They complete their order, which comes to £0.00 because your university has already covered the cost, and then enroll in your textbook.
Send your students Getting Started with Your Blended Teaching Textbook along with the link. It walks them through creating their account and enrolling, step by step and with screenshots, and answers the questions they most often ask.
From that point on their progress through the videos and chapters is tracked, and you can follow the whole class from Student Progress in your Control Center.
That is everything. Your new version is live and your students have the one link they need 🙌