Dear UMBC Students,

As a part of our emergency preparations, including those for COVID-19 (coronavirus), we want to assure you that UMBC is committed to maintaining its academic and research mission. To accomplish this, we need to be prepared for a variety of situations, including events that may make the campus difficult or impossible to access for an extended period of time. Should this occur, UMBC will continue to offer courses and instruction remotely. 

UMBC has a number of instructional technologies that are available to enable remote instruction and your course instructors will provide you with specific guidance if it becomes necessary to move a course to an online format. Many of the resources that are available to students to support online course delivery are described at doit.umbc.edu/itnm or umbc.edu/go/instruction.

Almost all students and instructors currently utilize UMBC’s online learning management system, Blackboard, to manage some aspects of their courses and support communications between students and instructors. Blackboard can, and is, also used to deliver instruction remotely. Therefore, at this time, we are asking those students who have not used Blackboard before to practice logging into the UMBC’s Blackboard by following these steps:

To log into Blackboard with your UMBC account, visit blackboard.umbc.edu or click the “Bb” icon in myUMBC.

To access tutorial instructions and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), review “Blackboard Help” on the Institution Page (or directly at blackboard.umbc.edu and visit “Blackboard Help” on the login screen or just umbc.edu/blackboard/help).

These preparations are designed to support continuation of instruction in emergency situations where the university is closed for an extended period of time and not for shorter events such as weather related closures. In the event that an extended closure of campus is necessary you will receive additional communications and instructions from both the university and your instructors.

Dr. Philip Rous, Provost