Blackboard Collaborate: Setting up a meeting space

Creating a meeting space.

Adding Collaborate to a D2L Course

Collaborate isn’t active by default within courses at UWSP. In order to add access, you’ll need to make a small modification to your navigation bar. To do so, choose Edit Course from the right side of your course navbar.

Choose “Navigation & Themes” from the list of tools. You’ll see that “Course Default” is selected as your active navbar. Select the “Course Home with Web Conferencing Access” from the drop down menu and click “Apply”.

Creating an online room from the UW System HRS portal

Collaborate is available to anyone on a UW campus, not just instructors and students. People without access to D2L can create an online room by using the UW System HRS portal, located at You can also find the HRS portal within MyPoint under the “Administrative” tab under the Personnel & Payroll heading. Select University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point, click the select button, and login using your UWSP username and password. You’ll find “Web Conferencing” under the “Employee Resources” tab.

Creating a Room


Return to your course home and click the “Online Rooms” link. A blue and white “New Room” button is located near the bottom left of the page. Click it to create a room.

You’ll be prompted to enter a few things:

  • Name – The name you want to give the room
  • Service Provider – This should be set to Collaborate by default. Please do not change it
  • Account Name – This should be set to Elluminate – UWSP by default. Please do not change it.
  • Description – Can be entered to describe the topic of meeting. This is useful if you maintain a number of meeting rooms.
  • Room Visibilty – Restricted vs public selection. Restricted only allows the students you add to the attendees list to enter the room, public allows anyone in the course to enter the room.
  • Availability – Set a room starting and ending time. Often, instructors will configure a room to run for the duration of the semester. You can keep a room open for 1 year.
  • Attendees raise their hand onentry – This will flag users names when they join the room. Useful for instructors to notice new meeting attendees
  • All attendees join as Moderators – This gives all attendees full privilages in the room. Most instructors feel it is better to add privilages to students as they are needed rather than giving all students all priviilages.
  • Participants have unrestricted access to resources – Allows everyone to see everything. Also not a recommended seting
  • Moderators can view all private chats - Participants can chat with each other, both in the big group, but also in private conversations. This setting allows the instructor to see side conversations between students.
  • Early Room Entry (in Minutes) – This determines how much before the beginning of a session an attendee can join the room.
  • Archive Mode - These are your recording settings. Manual will prompt you to record before each session. Automatic starts a recording whenenver someone is in the room. Disabled restricts the session from being recorded.
  • Email Notification - You can choose to send email notification to attendees. Most instructors don’t check this box.
  • Add attendees – If you chose to make the room private, you’ll need to add attendees. Click on the “Add Attendees” button to add emails to the list of users.

After you have configured settings, click on the save button. Your room is ready add Participants

Adding participants

Click Add Attendees


  1. A list of internal members will show and you can chose different organizational units to access different people. To add internal participants, simply click their name once and it will be highlighted blue, then select Add

3. To add an external attendee, scroll to the bottom of the same page and select Add External Attendee

4. Enter all email addresses of external attendees

5. Click Add

6. Review all participants – At the bottom of the page you will see all participants you have selected – internal and external – delete participants by clicking the “X” beside their name

7. Click Add

Notifying Participants

Once you have added participants, you can choose to send email notifications to them.

As noted on the above screen shot, external attendees will always receive email notifications at the specified email address.

Please note that internal participants will also receive an email whether or not “Send email notification to all attendees who are configured to receive email” is checked.

Attendees will receive an email similar to this:


Editinga Room

On the Online Rooms home page, click the context dropdown menu next to the room you would like to edit and select Edit Room

Note – You may only edit the time frame of a room if the room has not started yet