What's new in the Ultra Experience?

In previous versions of Ultra, faculty had to create the discussion, test or assignment first before they could create the groups. With this release, instructors can create groups first and then attach them to course activities.

NOTE: Group Sets still do not have a bulk student enrollment option. Self-enroll is not available for Group Sets. 

TBD

Zero point assignments will be available: Currently, when you set an assignment to zero, Ultra will reset the points to 100. 

• Current workaround: How do I create an ungraded Ultra assignment?

Ally alternative formats and instructor accessibility scores are available for embedded files and images in documents, tests, and assignments in Ultra courses.

TBD

Instructors can download files from the Ultra gradebook or from the submissions list page with the Download all option. Instructors can then choose whether to download all or select specific submissions. Instructors receive an email and a course message when the ZIP file is ready to download to their computers.

TBD

Decimal point values for assessments

When creating a question in an assessment, instructors can enter values with up to two numbers after the decimal in the Points field. For assessments with no individual questions, the Maximum points field will accept values with up to two numbers after the decimal.

When instructors prepare a course for an upcoming term, they commonly copy all content, including the gradebook, from the last term’s course. For courses that used the attendance tool, the copied attendance gradebook column was difficult to remove in the Ultra Course View. With this release, instructors can delete attendance gradebook columns added during a course copy from the destination course’s gradebook.

Instructors can delete copied attendance columns from the gradebook menu. The attendance column that is correctly associated with the course can be deleted if all students’ attendance records are removed first.

Instructors can create self-enrollment groups for students to join to complete group assignments and discussions. Instructors choose the number of groups, can set the maximum members per group, and may allow students to view other members of the groups before they choose a group.

Review Blackboard's documentation or UMBC's FAQs

On an item's Submissions page in the Ultra gradebook, instructors can use the new Filter menu to display only those submissions that need grading. At this time, instructors can filter by All statuses and Needs grading. Note: Group and discussion items do not yet appear in the Needs Grading filter.

To help build assessments quickly and encourage academic integrity, instructors can now create question pools in the Ultra Course View. With question pools, students receive different sets of questions to answer. Instructors can add questions from all existing tests, assignments, and question banks in their courses.

In the Ultra Course View, question pools replace the Original Course View's random blocks and question sets. Instructors can create as many question pools as they want and add, edit, and remove questions in the pools. Edits appear anywhere questions are used. 

Review Blackboard's documentation 

Users will be to access their UMBC Google storage from within their profile, from the Tools page, or from an Ultra course.

Review UMBC's documentation

For higher stakes assessments, a double marking process is sometimes used in which each student’s submission is evaluated by two graders and a final grader reviews those evaluations to make the final decision on a student’s grade. This approach intends to reduce bias and is often paired with student anonymity. When setting up an assignment in the Ultra Course View, instructors can enable parallel grading and select non-student course members to act as graders and reconcilers. Instructors can also hide student names to prevent unintended bias.

This feature is known as Delegated Grading in an Original course. 

Review Blackboard's documentation or UMBC's FAQ 

Instructors and students often use calendars to organize and keep track of events. Access to a course calendar is crucial to meeting deadlines and overall success. Having access to all events – both personal and academic – in one place helps keep everyone on track. In this release, users can synchronize external calendars with Blackboard Learn, building on the previously released capabilities.

A new enhancement to the Courses page provides users with an option to view courses in list or grid mode. Stock images randomly display for each course card when grid mode is active. The banner image can be replaced by faculty who would prefer to personalize the course visual.

Original courses with existing banners will find those images are preloaded on the Courses page. The banner images uploaded through the Courses page will NOT pass over to the course regardless of whether it is Original or Ultra.

Instructors want to be confident that their courses are well-designed and function as intended—before their students see them. Instructors can use student preview to review the course content. They can also validate the course behaviors, such as those that control course content availability or require a particular interaction from the students to be triggered. With student preview, instructors can experience their courses exactly as their students do. 

Start student preview from anywhere within an Ultra course. The preview creates user in your course that you can use to view everything as a student would. 

Review Blackboard's documentation or UMBC's FAQ

With this release, instructors can now directly import question banks, including question pools that have been exported from Original courses and packages of questions that have been purchased from a publisher. These questions are then available for use and reuse across the assessments in that course.

As with any conversion from Original to Ultra, question types that are not yet supported are dropped during the processing of the imported file.

Review Blackboard's documentation or UMBC's FAQ 

In this update, faculty can provide feedback for an entire group and individual feedback for each student. Group feedback is seen by all students in the group while individual feedback is only visible to the instructor and student.

Share Bb calendar with external services

With this release, the Activity Stream more accurately reports on third-party content to keep everyone more up to date. Specifically, LTI and manual grade column notifications will update in the Activity Stream when: 

• The item transitions from due to overdue 
• The item’s due date is updated 
• The item is deleted 
• The item is graded 
• The item’s visibility is changed 

New Facilitator role for courses, which contains a set of default privileges regarding course calendar, discussions, gradebook, announcements, materials, and groups. Course members can be granted this role to help maintain the pace of the course throughout the term or as needed.

This release also includes two new granular privileges to grant a user the ability to create or delete a discussion in the Ultra Course View.

Instructors can now grant individual students additional time to access an assessment, even if it is hidden to other students. Additional attempts may also be configured, again for an individual student on an individual assessment. In the future, Blackboard plans to introduce due date exceptions so that students who are granted extended access will not be marked late for submissions made after the original due date.

Review Blackboard's documentation

Enhanced discussion analytics

In this release, Activity Stream notification settings are more granular for students and instructors, giving them the option to choose which information they wish to receive. Settings have been reformatted so users can select to receive all notifications at a high level, like notifications for new discussions. Users can also choose to see updates about specific events or activity in their Activity Streams. For example, an instructor can choose to be notified when a blog entry is edited.

Existing settings are carried over and saved in the new format. Visual cues display if all, some, or none of the notification types are selected.

Announcements: Individuals with these privileges can create course announcements in both course views. Additional entitlements allow users to view draft announcements in addition to posted announcements.

Calendar: Individuals with these privileges can add, edit, and delete course calendar events in both course views. In the Ultra Course View, individuals with these privileges can also add, edit, and delete office hours and course schedules.

Use Case: Faculty who have students working with the Supplemental Instruction-Peer Assisted Study Sessions (SI-PASS) program may request a custom role for those students, allowing them to post announcements while maintaining student privileges in all other parts of the course.

The LockDown Browser is a custom browser that locks down the testing environment within Blackboard Learn, which means that students are unable to copy, print, access other applications, or visit other websites during an online exam. It works seamlessly with Blackboard Learn and is built in to the assessment settings. When instructors configure an assessment to require the LockDown Browser, students will only be able to begin their attempts if they access the assessment with the LockDown Browser.

After February, 6 2019, faculty can access this tool in an Ultra course by selecting the Settings area in a test or an assignment.

Review Blackboard's documentation

Review FAQ

Search gradebook columns and categories

If an instructor needs to check on the status for a single gradebook column or create a simple, filtered view of a specific gradebook category across all students, there are additional search options to reduce the scrolling and visual scanning required to quickly verify or filter. Begin typing the title of a column or category in to the gradebook grid view search field. Search results include any columns, categories, or even students who match the search term or phrase. We've included a label within the search results to help distinguish among these three types of results.

Push notifications to Blackboard App

Push notifications for Learn Ultra will allow students to gain direct insight via this notification modal. Notifications may help students stay on top of new content added to their courses, new grades and feedback that have been created for assessed items, and due date reminders for upcoming assessments that need to be completed and submitted. 

Note: The corresponding functionality in the Blackboard App will be made available in the coming months so Ultra Courses won't push notifications yet. Users in the Original experience are still able to receive push notifications.

The Ultra gradebook currently has the ability to search for students using the grid view. With this release, instructors can go to the submission list and quickly locate a particular student to check the status of submissions or access the submission itself.

Additionally, Blackboard added pagination to the submission list. The default view is for 25 students, but instructors may also set the page to display 50 or 100 users. This setting is sticky, so a selection of 50 or 100 is retained when instructors leave the submission list and return later.

NOTE: When converting a learning module from the Original Course View to the Ultra Course View, the force sequence requirement is unchecked by default. Additionally, the file and folder structure may be flattened because the Course Content page only supports nested content two folders deep. Student activity in a learning module is removed when converting to Ultra.

The new Originality Report uses Blackboard's Ultra design and includes some new information about a submission's overall risk for being copied from another source. This new report interface is also more responsive for mobile devices and more accessible to screen readers than the old design.

Instructors who make use of Item Analysis in Original courses recognize the benefit this report provides, specifically for reviewing the quality of assessment questions and improving assessments from one term to the next. However, many instructors are either unaware that this report is available or are not familiar with the term “item analysis” and don’t open the report. In the Ultra Course View, Blackboard updated the title to Question Analysis as a way to raise awareness of this powerful report and encourage its use.

Question analysis provides statistics on overall performance, assessment quality, and individual questions. This data helps you recognize questions that might be poor discriminators of student performance. Question analysis is for assessments with questions. You can also download the report with raw question data to analyze it or keep it for future uses.