Reading and Printing Course Documents

New: Watch a closed-captioned movie that shows you how to open and print course documents in BeachBoard [opens a new window]

Instructor use of BeachBoard is completely optional. Some instructors post all of their handouts and PowerPoint presentations on BeachBoard and some do not. To discover if your instructor has posted his or her course documents to BeachBoard, login to BeachBoard and then, under my courses, select the hyperlink for the name of your course. If you see the word “unavailable” to the right of the course’s name, that signifies that your instructor has not yet made his or her course available to the students. It is not uncommon for some instructors to post their course content to BeachBoard but to accidentally forget to make their courses available to the students. If your instructor informed you in class that he or she has posted something to BeachBoard but that instructor’s BeachBoard course is still unavailable, please contact your instructor. It should also be noted that a common trick that students play on one another is to announce that they are able to access unavailable courses. If a fellow student tells you this, they are playing a practical joke on you. When a course is unavailable, no student can access it.

Again, to discover if your instructor has posted his or her course documents to BeachBoard, login to BeachBoard and then, under my courses, select the hyperlink for the name of your course.

On the left side of the course’s homepage, select the appropriate hyperlink to locate your instructor’s course documents. Most instructors post their course documents in the Course Documents folder which you can access by selecting the Course Documents hyperlink.

If the Course Documents folder displays the words “Folder empty,” that can signify one of four things:

Your instructor has not yet posted his or her course content to BeachBoard.
Your instructor has posted his or her course content in another folder in your BeachBoard course. Select the hyperlinks on the left side of the page to access those other folders.
Your instructor has posted his or her content but has placed a date and time restriction on that content. Instructors can choose at what date and time a particular course document appears and disappears from the course.
Your instructor has chosen to remove his or her content.

The solution for all four of these scenarios is the same: if you are unable to locate your course’s content, please notify your instructor in class, via email, or via telephone.

If your instructor has posted his or her course documents to BeachBoard, BeachBoard will display a list of those documents. To open a particular course document, select that document’s hyperlink.

Depending upon your web browser and operating system, BeachBoard will either display a pop-up window asking you if you want to open or save the file or will simply open the file inside of BeachBoard. Please note that large files—particularly files over 500 kilobytes—may take a while to open. A good rule of thumb is to remember that each 500 kilobytes takes approximately 10 seconds to download on campus and approximately 1 minute to download on a dial-up connection.

While BeachBoard can store files created in practically any computer program, please note that you may need special software to be able to open and view these files’ contents. For example, to open a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, you need to have Microsoft PowerPoint, or a program that can open Microsoft PowerPoint files, installed on your computer. To open a Microsoft Word document, you need to have either Microsoft Word or a Word viewer installed on your computer. To open Adobe Acrobat PDFs, you need either the free Adobe Reader or the commercial version of Adobe Acrobat. Students can purchase Microsoft Office at a significant discount in the University Bookstore and download the Adobe reader for free at Adobe.com. In addition, all CSULB computer lab computers contain the software necessary to open most of the files your instructor may post to BeachBoard. If you have questions about, or have difficulty opening, a particular BeachBoard file, please contact your instructor. To print a file from a BeachBoard course, select the Course Documents hyperlink on the left side of the page and then right-click or Command-click fithe document’s hyperlink. Choose either Save Target As… or Save Link As…and save the file to your computer’s hard drive.

Doing this places a copy of the file on your computer, ensuring that you can open, read, and print this file’s contents at any time, even when your Internet connection is down. To print this file, double-click on the file’s icon on your computer and then go to File > Print [or press Crtl + P or Command + P]