Serving web pages through Learning Central

This week, thanks to Allan Theophanides from the Cardiff University Enhanced Learning Technology Team, I learned how to serve web pages through Learning Central. Learning Central is the local name of Cardiff University’s Blackboard service. We use it to communicate with students, to host learning material and deliver grades. It can also be used to deliver web content.

How to do this:
(1)     Log into Learning Central.
(2)     Go to Content Collection:

(3)     Upload a file (you can also upload a zipped collection of files) with some html in it:

(4)     Choose a file and press “Submit”:

(5)     You should see the green bar at the top: “Success: Item added”:

(6)     To serve this publicly, you need to change the file Permissions. When you put your mouse over the right hand side of the file and click, a new menu comes up. Select “Permissions”:

(7)     On the Manage Permissions page, select Permit Anyone.

(9)    Set permissions to Read and click submit:

(10)     You should get a Green Bar which says “Action has succeeded.” and your permissions should include the public:

(10)     Click OK to go back to your My Content:

(10)     So now the file permissions should have changed to a symbol of a hand holding the world:

(11)     Now, where is this file served – what’s the web address? Here’s how to find out:

(12)     Press on the right hand side of the file again. A menu will come up. Select Edit Settings:

(13)    One of the settings is the Permanent URL:

You can cut and paste this into your browser and check that the page is working as you would like. You can also share it on your blog, twitter, etc to publicise and share the excellent new resource that you have made.