What's new in the Ultra Experience?

Please review the FAQs before the release for more information about this important change.

Currently, instructors can add file attachments to Ultra Documents and Assessments. Students who click on the file attachment link(s) can download the file(s).

With this release, instructors can set the behavior for attachments in Ultra Documents and Assessments:

• view and download (default)
• view only
• download only

The view option renders the file in the web browser without the need to download a file and open it with a specific application. Supported files include: PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OpenOffice. Office files are converted to PDF and will be cached for 30 days.

Instructors may want student groups to submit work in phases. Other instructors may wish to provide student groups with iterative feedback. With this release, instructors will now have the option to give more than one attempt for group assessments. 

The question filter supports common test taking strategies to reduce test anxiety. Students may complete questions they know first and skip harder ones. The filter enables students to quickly return to skipped questions. Students may also use the filter to find essay questions.

If a student submits a test with unanswered questions, a warning will alert the student. The alert shows the number of unanswered questions. The student may choose to submit the test or keep working. If the student chooses to keep working, the unanswered questions filter auto applies. The unanswered questions display automatically.

In February, Bb released the Prohibit late submissions & Prohibit new attempts after the due date feature. With this release, there are two enhancements:

• An instructor has selected this setting for an assessment. If students have submitted attempts, the instructor cannot change the due date to a date in the past.
• If the due date has passed, the instructor will not be able to select the "prohibit late submission" setting.

These changes prevent instructors from triggering the submission of in-progress and saved attempts.

This release adds new functionality for the Bb Annotate grading tool: An "undo" and "redo" option. An instructor may undo a change and then if inclined, redo it.

NOTE: "Undo" and "redo" will not apply to comments. All other annotations are included for this capability.

To better support instructors and students who use journals:

• students may make unlimited entries
• students and instructors have improved navigation with pagination on the entries page
• students and instructors can decide the number of items that appear per page
• instructors have a count of graded journals

When a user is idle for over three hours the session ends. A user must login again to continue to use Blackboard. If a user saves a page or selects a button, the session refreshes and stays active for three more hours. There can be times a user is working but considered idle. This happens because the browser is not sending data to Blackboard:

• posting or responding to a discussion,
• creating an assignment submission in the text editor, or
• creating a content item.

With this release, users whose session is ending soon will receive a warning. This warning will appear at least six minutes before the session times out. If the user closes the warning before the session ends, the session will extend for three more hours.

NOTE: A user away from the computer for an extended time will receive the warning, but will not be able to extend their session. When the user closes the warning, they will return to the login page.

Supporting academic integrity and protecting assessment content is important. Instructors need controls and flexibility for sharing assessment results with students. This new choice allows the instructor to decide when assessment results become available.

If selected, the instructor defines when the student can view their assessment submission:

• after submitting the assessment,
• after the instructor posts the individual student's grade for the assessment,
• after the assessment due date,
• after the instructor posts all the grades for the assessment, or
• on a specific date.

When not selected, students cannot view:

• assessment content such as the title, videos or images, text sections,
• the assessment questions,
• answers,
• automatic feedback, or
• the additional content section at the end of the assessment.

Watch a video about how instructors can decide when assessment results become available for students.

This new option gives control to the instructor to post grades at the right time. When selected, an assessment grade appears to the student as soon as the attempt is graded. To prevent students from viewing grades, the instructor may de-select this option. The instructor may view this new setting in the assessment settings and assessment preview panels. The workflow to post grades manually is still the same.

Watch video about how instructors can control to post grades at the right time.

Robust and diverse questions better support assessment across various disciplines. The calculated numeric question type is important for math and other STEM courses.

This new question type supports the following:

• Students may enter a number as an answer. The number can be an integer, decimal, or scientific notation. The largest value supported is 16 digits.
• Instructors may combine text and mathematical formulas in the question.
• Instructors may define an answer range. The range value can be an integer, decimal, or scientific notation. The largest value supported is 16 digits.
• The answer field validates only numeric digits.

Watch a video about how to use this new question type within assessments and other student resources.

Instructors may need to download test results for external analysis and evaluation. External analysis is important for supporting course quality and assessment efforts. Furthermore, institutions often want compiled assessment data for accreditation and program review activities. With this release, instructors may download assessment results in the Ultra course experience. Instructors may download assessment results from either the gradebook grid or list views.

Watch a video about how to download test and assessment results data.

For each attempt a student makes, the instructor can search for a receipt confirmation number. This helps instructors find student submissions when extra verification is needed. Using this receipt confirmation number, the instructor can find the following information:

• assessment name
• assessment grade
• the number of attempts for an assessment the student who submitted the assessment
• the size of any file included with the submission; this allows the instructor to insight into what a student has attached for marking
• submission date and time stamp

This information appears on the peek panel for all submitted attempts.

Watch a video about how to access student submission receipts.

Course copy is an important feature for building out and updating courses. This new workflow supplies a way to duplicate content for quicker course building. Instructors can access the Copy Content menu to search for the current course. From there it is easy to navigate content and select content to copy or duplicate.

Supported content types include:

• Folders
• Documents
• Tests, including group tests
• Assignments, including group assignments
• Links to websites
• SCORM packages
• Discussions and Journals
• Learning Modules and individual items within a Learning Module

Watch a video about how to copy content within a single Ultra course.

Instructors and students can author and share computer code in the Content Editor using a new Code Snippet tool. The Content Editor identifies eleven programming syntaxes: Python; Java; JavaScript; Kotlin; R; PHP; Go; C; Swift; C# and HTML.

Watch a video about how to author and share computer code in the Ultra course content editor using the new Code Snippet tool.

The Blackboard Instructor app provides instructors with a way to manage courses on a mobile device. New updates include improvements to managing course content, grading, and engaging students. The new app uses Responsive Web Design (RWD) for Ultra courses. RWD ensures consistency and reduces the differences between desktop and mobile experiences.

Instructors will now be able to complete the following tasks in Ultra courses using the Blackboard Instructor app:

• course building - including creating and uploading content
• grading students work - including updating assessment settings
• communication - including participation in discussions

The enhanced Blackboard Instructor app will be available on April 11, 2022, from the iOS and Android app stores. If you have already downloaded the app then it will be automatically updated if you have this choice enabled on your device or will require a manual update if this choice is not selected.

To help users understand changes and effectively use new features, Blackboard will introduce:

• Product updates are brief mentions of what is new in the Ultra Course View or Original Course View. Product updates will vary by role so instructors will have different updates from students.
• User engagement surveys are brief polls launched to a small sample of users. Each survey has its own purpose. For example, a survey might ask users to rate their overall experience of a feature or workflow. A user can easily dismiss a survey and will not see the survey again.

When a user is idle for over three hours the session ends. A user must login again to continue to use Blackboard. If a user saves a page or selects a button, the session refreshes and stays active for three more hours. There can be times a user is working but considered idle. This happens because the browser is not sending data to Blackboard. Some examples are when a user is:

• authoring a Discussion Board post,
• authoring an Assignment submission in the text editor in Learn, or
• creating a Content Item.

With this release, users whose session is ending soon will receive a warning. This warning will appear at least six minutes before the session times out. If the user closes the warning before the session ends, the session will extend for three more hours.

When an instructor creates a learning module, all settings appear in a peek panel that opens on the right that lets the instructor:

• name the learning module,
• set the visibility of the learning module for students,
• add an optional description,
• apply forced sequence to the content in the module. Note this option is no longer available on the Release Conditions panel.

An instructor can add more content to a learning module with forced sequence applied. If an instructor adds or changes content, a warning notifies the instructor: "Additions and changes in content can make students who already started the module follow a different order."

Test taking can be a stressful experience. We have designed a new test header to improve the student's testing experience. The new header provides students with key information to inform their test-taking strategy. The new header displays the following helpful information:

• a progress bar,
• the number of answered questions out of the total questions in the test or assignment,
• and time remaining if the instructor has set a time limit.

The header is sticky, meaning that it is always visible as a student navigates the test. This header also appears in assignments that include questions.

Existing user-generated course packages will be set to expire in 90 days after the March update. Users who can create course packages will receive a one-time email notification about this change. Course packages created after the March update will expire and auto-delete 30 days after the creation date.

Users will be notified about the auto-deletion date in three ways:

• When creating the package, the interface informs the user of this time constraint.
• The notification that a package is ready to download informs the user of the time constraint.
• In the course package list view for the course, the removal date displays for each package.

Instructors can now select content from Original courses when copying content to an Ultra course. Previously, one had to go into the Original course and push the copied content into Ultra, which could be inconsistent in performance. This enhancement to course copy provides efficiencies and greater flexibility for reusing content. This will save time and reduce frustration when building a course.

The course copy procedure and process remain the same. The Copy Content menu now includes both Original and Ultra courses. Instructors may choose to copy all or select content. If the system encounters a problem with content copy an error report will appear. The details will provide more information about why the content failed to copy.

Supported content types are as follows:

• folders
• documents
• tests, including group tests
• assignments, including group assignments
• links to websites
• SCORM packages
• discussions and journals

This feature is released to Ultra first and will come to Original at a later date.

Providing visually appealing courses that adhere to accessibility best practices and standards can help engage students and ensure an equitable learning experience. To ensure that all visual elements are accessible, faculty will have the option to include an image description when uploading a banner image in the course or add an image description to existing course banner images. Images can also be marked as decorative whenever they are not used as primary content. 

Groups are also enhanced in the December update. A new choice to hide course groups from the students’ view gives instructors the option to use groups to discretely organize students based on their performance, interests, adopted knowledge, and other criteria. The visibility of the groups can be easily seen when using gradebook filters or conditional release.

When adding a time limit accommodation, faculty may specify any percentage of extra time (e.g., 15% or 80%) that is needed to honor a time limit accommodation. Currently, faculty must use a fixed percentage for for the additional time accommodation. This change provides greater flexibility to the instructor supporting both the students’ needs and the instructor’s assessment strategy.

Instructors and graders will be able to save common preferences for the Bb Annotate grading tools, which minimizes the need to reset between grading student submissions.

Note: This feature is on a gradual deployment, which means it may be released over several weeks rather than with the update on December 2nd.

Individual file uploads in Original courses will be limited to 75 MB to reduce impact on course quotas. The file upload limit applies to both faculty AND student submissions.

Instructional Technology recommends that large files are uploaded to cloud storage and media files (audio/video) to Panopto. 

As part of planned diversity, equity, and inclusion improvements, this update allows users to express to others their personal pronouns. This fosters greater respect between students and with faculty engaging online by letting others know how best to refer to them in their group activities and discussions.

The first phase of pronoun support will display pronouns to users in Ultra courses. A future release will allow for the display of pronouns in Original courses.

NOTE: Support for pronouns in Blackboard will be announced at a later date. Please follow myUMBC for updates.

As a next phase in Blackboard's work to improve overall navigation and an intuitive course experience, the course card image the Courses page can now be used as a course banner in Ultra courses.

When adding a new course image, instructors can opt to make it visible within the course and are able to easily crop the image to the preferred size and zoom in or out on the uploaded image to select the part they want to focus on. This change also makes it easier for instructors to add a course schedule and for students to identify course faculty members and class meeting days, times, and location.

In October tables were released. With the next update, tables have additional formatting options:

• Text Style
• Alignment options
• List Attachment
• Insert content

These options provide greater flexibility for faculty and students, especially in disciplines where the presentation and formatting of data is particularly important.

The first phase of progress tracking required no activity in the course to be enabled. With this release, instructors will be able to enable progress tracking at any time during the term. Enabling this functionality will give students an easy way to keep track of what they have done inside each one of their courses.

When enabling progress tracking later than the beginning of the term, participatory items will be retroactively marked as complete. For example, assessments submitted previously by students will be marked as complete. Non-participatory items, like Ultra documents, will still need to be manually marked by students.

Students need a way to ensure their work has been correctly submitted into the system. There are times where a student believes they have submitted their work when, in fact, it wasn't sent at all, or it wasn't sent successfully.

This new functionality provides students with a unique tracking number that confirms their academic submission. Students can copy and save this number as proof of their work, and evidence for academic disputes. A modal window with the tracking information will appear to students after they submit their work. They can also receive an email with that information to their UMBC email, and download a similar text file to keep for their records.

Rubrics are grading tools that help instructors to assess student performance and give feedback in detail. Before, Ultra allowed a maximum of 10 columns and rows. To provide more flexibility for the grading processes, Blackboard will increase the limit up to 15 columns and rows.

Tables are a common way for instructors and students to align and organize content in a customized manner, better suited to their own preferences. For deeper versatility in the Rich Text Editor, there will be an Add Table functionality.

NOTE: For this initial release, tables will not support:

• Text Style
• Alignment options
• List
• Undo
• Attachments
• Insert content

To help instructors, teaching assistants, and graders have a better view of the content they're grading, Blackboard widened the screen of the submission area. It also includes a collapsible and expandable panel where users can navigate through tabs such as rubrics, feedback, and originality report.

Additionally, instructors and students can navigate the submission view and the panel tabs with different scroll bars. Independent scroll bars allow instructors or graders to scroll up and down the submission content without affecting the side tab navigation or the header. Now, instructors can use rubrics in a more practical way and provide feedback focused on a specific part of the submission.

At the end of Ultra Assignments and Tests there is section called “Additional Content” where students can add text, images and files to complete their submissions or support their answers. This section was always included by default and could confuse students into thinking they needed to complete this extra requirement. Instructors would like to choose when this should be an option or not.

In this release, Blackboard has added a toggle to allow instructors to show or hide the “Additional Content” section. This gives greater control to instructors over what’s displayed to their students during assessments. If an assessment only has text or support visuals but doesn’t have questions, this section will be the space for the submission and will be activated always. If an assessment has questions, this section will hold additional content, for students to add supporting evidence, and the instructor can enable or disable it.

Email notifications are reminders to help instructors and students keep track of important updates in their courses. In this release, we've made an email styling enhancement to the following email areas:

• New announcement
• New message
• Assessment overdue soon
• Assessment overdue
• Daily digest

To provide better context, the course ID appears now above the course name. Message content will now follow the justification that the author selected. This makes messages easier to read and allows greater customization for the author. The footer now explains when notification settings can be managed. Finally, the new general style is cleaner and should align better to user expectations. We're excited because users will receive the valuable information contained in their emails in the best possible way.

When an instructor deletes a student submission containing peer reviews, they'll receive a warning message, as they'll lose those reviews. The list of affected students will be visible. When grading or viewing peer reviews, the submission from a disabled or unavailable student will still be available.

If a student started or completed a review on a student submission that is no longer available (because it belongs to a disabled or unavailable student), they'll see they no longer have access to it. The student can start a different review if they’d like or if asked by the instructor. An instructor can see when a student completed a review that’s no longer available, giving the opportunity to let the student know they don’t need to complete another review if that’s preferred.

Students can mark and track their progress inside their courses. Progress tracking will be initially limited to only new courses where no activity has taken place. Instructors will need to make a decision before their course has started whether they want to try progress tracking or not. Those who choose to turn the feature on will provide Blackboard with valuable input about how the feature functions to help improve it in future releases.

In this first version, student preview activity counts as activity, so if anything has been done from student preview mode, instructors won’t be able to turn this feature on.

Ultra Course View is getting a new navigation menu! The top menu will be changed to text based vs. the iconography currently used. The top menu will be sticky – this means that it will remain visible to users even after they have scrolled down the page. In a later release, instructors will be able to add a banner image to their course homepage.

Additionally, the Student Preview tool will be moved to the new header. This will allow instructors access to student preview whenever they are on any top navigation page (e.g. Calendar, Gradebook, etc.)

Gradebook in Ultra Course View is getting advanced filtering options! Filter your gradebook view by multiple variables like users, groups, items, and categories. Navigate back and forth among student submissions that are included in the selected filters. Bookmark frequently used filters to reuse in a course for that term.

Being rewarded is a powerful extrinsic motivator. One of the best rewards is recognition for a job well done. You can reward your students with badges throughout your course to keep students motivated and create a map of what they can learn. You can award badges for the completion of a project, skill proficiency, or levels of experience. Students' badge collections can represent the key learning milestones that they met. Earned badges show a complete view of a person's skills and achievements. 

The Badgr integration replaces achievements currently used in an Original course.

Given the rapid shift to online learning, virtual office hours or synchronous collaboration sessions have become quite common. Instructors want the ability to easily link sessions to calendar invitations so students can have the best opportunity to successfully find where they need to be.

The Ultra calendar will support web addresses and hyperlinks in the calendar location field. Instructors can link any virtual tool of their choice in the calendar event, and students can launch the virtual session from the calendar itself.

• Calculated formula: Question text
• Essay: Answer text
• Matching: Question/Answer pairs
• Multiple Answer: Answer options
• Multiple Choice: Answer options
• Ordering: Answer options
• Short Answer: Answer text

The Content Editor for Original Experience and Original Course View was last updated in November 2020. Since then, there have been inconsistencies in the way content is formatted when editing content and when viewing it. With this release, settings like font, size, color, and spacing are more consistent. When existing content is selected, the editor tool bar updates to display its current font, size, and header settings. This creates a better WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) experience.

NOTE: This feature will NOT be available at UMBC until a patch is available to reconcile usernames and campusIDs with our email structure.

The updated Microsoft Teams integration provides enrollment synchronization between Ultra courses and MS Teams class participants for up to 1800 enrollments in a course.