About Illinois Compass
Illinois Compass, powered by Blackboard Vista Enterprise Edition, is an enterprise learning management system that gives faculty, instructors, students, and others a collaborative online space with tools for managing and delivering course assignments, tracking and publishing grades, and keeping course material available to students outside the classroom walls. The system has been customized for use by University faculty.
Requesting Your Course Site
Please use our Online Request Form to request your course site. The course site request tool allows you to edit, track, and cancel your requests at your convenience, without needing to call or email our office. You are able to:
- Assign roles within Illinois Compass to TAs and others when you make your initial request.
- See when the roster for your course site(s) was last updated.
- Easily identify previous course sites for copying content from semester to semester.
We recommend that you request your Compass course sites as early as possible each semester to avoid the rush at the beginning of the semester. There is a manual process involved in the creation of Compass course sites and course sites are built in the order in which the requests are received. Request early to help ensure that your site is ready before the beginning of the semester.
Once you have requested your sites, you can easily manage your requests by using the Site Manager at: https://edtech.cites.uiuc.edu/CompassSiteRequest/sitemanager.do
Roster Uploads and Course Availability
We normally begin uploading student rosters the Friday before classes begin. We then update rosters once daily, Monday through Friday, until two days after the last add/drop day. Because deleting users could erase grade data or student work, we only ADD students to your course site. Instructors are responsible for removing students who have dropped. For instructions on deleting users please see Adding and Deleting Users. Once the student rosters have been uploaded, students enrolled in the course have access to the Compass site. Student access to the Compass site is normally turned off after the end of the semester. Instructors continue to have access to the course site until it has been archived and removed from the server, normally at least a year after the course was offered.
Student Information in the Grade Book
To facilitate roster management, in your grade book (Teach > Grade Book > Members) you will find columns indicating each student’s UIN, section information, and graduate/undergraduate status.
Back-ups and Archives of Previous
Semester Course Sites
Faculty do not need to back-up their entire Illinois Compass course
site(s), but we strongly recommend that you archive your grade book
data, as well as content files such as Word, PowerPoint, PDF, and
HTML files. CITES EdTech maintains a tape back-up of the entire
Illinois Compass server and we will keep all previous semester courses
on the server for a year after the semester ends. After a year,
CITES will archive course sites and take them off the server. If
needed, we will copy course content to another class web site to
be used in a future semester.
If you use the Compass grade book, we recommend exporting a back-up file every time there is a significant change. The Compass grade book export creates a .csv (comma-separated value) file. This file format can be opened in a spread sheet such as Microsoft Excel. To export grades from Illinois Compass, go to:
Teach tab > Grade Book > Export to Spreadsheet.
You should rename this file with your course name and date, and store it in a safe place. For more help see Exporting and Importing Grades. To save a local copy of your course site content files, you can visit the File Manager area, select the files you want to save, and download the file for safe keeping.
Illinois Compass Announcement Listserv
Anyone who has a role of instructor, designer, or teaching assistant within the Illinois Compass system will be automatically subscribed to the COMPASS-ANNOUNCE-L listserv. This listserv will be updated regularly.
We will use this listserv to send our regular communications and special announcements for instructors. We will also send emergency system announcements and information about special events planned specifically for Illinois Compass users.
We provide two additional lists to share educational technology related information and events. The EdTech eNewsletter, published three times per semester, provides more comprehensive information for using educational technologies. Our Teaching with Technology Brown Bag Series (faculty presentations on successful course implementations of educational technologies) also has a list for sending notices and reminders about upcoming presentations. You can subscribe to either of these by sending a message to edtech@uiuc.edu. Please include “Subscribe Brown Bag” or “Subscribe eNewsletter” in the subject line.
Reminder of Regular System Maintenance (Down Time)
Illinois Compass system maintenance is scheduled for every Wednesday from 5:00 A.M. to 9:00 A.M. During this time Compass may not be available for use. We strongly encourage you to keep this system down time in mind when scheduling deadlines and due dates in order to minimize the impact of regular system maintenance on academic work.
Getting Help with Illinois Compass
There are several ways to get help with Illinois Compass:
- Compass has context sensitive help on top of every page via the “HELP” link.
- Easy-to-follow web pages may be accessed through our Instructor Resources page.
- Compass Bug Watch information is listed in the wiki.
- Free Training and Consulting:
We encourage course designers to take advantage of the free training and consultation CITES offers on all of the programs we support. We offer group training, one-on-one consultations, and customized training designed for you. To make an appointment with a consultant, call 333-1078 or email edtech@uiuc.edu.
To see our training offerings go to: http://www.cites.uiuc.edu/edtech/calendar/
Contact Information
CITES Educational Technologies
2304 Digital Computer Lab
Office Hours: 8:30 A.M. ~ 5:00 P.M., M-F
Email: edtech@uiuc.edu
Phone: 333-1078
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