Studentcentral is the name we give to the University of Brighton “Blackboard” Virtual Learning Environment, a tool for supporting learning and teaching, but it also acts as a home page, linking to other systems and services such as Libraries and Email.
How studentcentral appears to a user varies with their role: applicant, enrolled student or staff. For instance a student applying to a course sees the applicant area and a student enrolled and studying on the course sees a Home and Studies tab.
watch the student journey through studentcentral video
(or view directly in Mediastream to enlarge/embed)
The New Student Area on studentcentral
The structure of a student’s study areas on Studentcentral mirrors the modular structure of degrees at the University, so a student, on for example a Masters in Computer Science will be enrolled on a number of eligible modules, some of which may be mandatory or compulsory. The details of which combinations of modules can contribute to a named degree is known as a “module diet”
Module descriptions are drafted in formal templated documents which have been approved through School Academic Scrutiny Committees and outline the key module information.
Each year an instance of the module may run, and the information about the module, who is enrolled upon it, and what marks they have achieved is held in SITS, the University application for managing student records.
In order to provide this modular structure in studentcentral each year around May Schools update their MAV (Module Availability) records in SITS, for each module they intend to run.
Once this information has been updated in SITS the module administrators can trigger the modules to create modules instances on studentcentral.
A module instance on studentcentral is created with a common structure so students know what to expect, and where things are.
By default the Module template has:
- A Dashboard
- Announcements
- Module Information
- Contacts
- Study Materials
- Reading List
- Assessment
- My Grades
- Module Guidance – a link which includes an outline of each of these components.
A student can access the modules upon which they are enrolled from the time school offices create module taking records in SITS (usually by October), but will be able to access studentcentral and their school and course content much earlier in the year.
What a student sees and when.
The attached documents outline the visibility of tabs to students with approximate timings:
- pdf showing the timeline of the student journey through studentcentral
- pdf showing the details of the tabs in studentcentral
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