Teaching Tip: How to get content from Word into Blackboard
February 24, 2015
The start of the spring semester still looms large in our rear view mirror. Many instructors
spent frenzied final hours before wrestling content into Blackboard. One frequent
source of challenge is that nearly all of us develop our lectures, notes and syllabi
in Microsoft Word. When we transfer these materials online, we unwittingly wander
into a decades-old battleground. We innocently expect that we should be able to copy
and paste from our Word document directly into Blackboard. But the potential layers
of complexity and conflict can be more than frustrating.
The root of the problem is that Microsoft Word documents contain invisible XML code
that controls formatting. When you highlight and copy a selection from your Word document,
you’re capturing these invisible codes, or worse, little orphaned fragments of formatting
code. When you then paste your selection into a text editor in Blackboard, these invisible
codes are going to haunt you, haunt you.
So, how can we safely get our content into Blackboard from Microsoft Word?
Option 1: From Word, you can save your work as a plain text file. (Save As, Format:Plain Text).
From this new plain version, you can safely copy and paste into Blackboard. You will
lose some of your formatting, but you’ll also leave behind the invisible code haunts.
Option 2: Consider typing the entry directly into Blackboard. Even if you’re retyping, you
might just save yourself some time in the long run. Saving time in Blackboard makes
you a Blackboard rock star.
Read the full Teaching Tip at iTeachU for more ways to safely format your content from Word and other sources.
-- Teaching Tip by Owen Guthrie, UAF eLearning instructional designer