The Ultra Course Redesign Challenge offers faculty an opportunity to share their redesigned courses using the new Ultra interface for a chance to win a Kindle Fire. 

The challenge is open to any UMBC instructor who is currently using or planning to use Ultra in a Blackboard course in the FA2019 semester during the phased roll-out of Ultra. Courses will be evaluated using the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program (ECP) rubric, which is aligned to the Quality Matters rubric. 

Challenge Guidelines

• Courses submitted to the challenge must be redesigned using the Ultra Course View. 

• Courses must be submitted by 11:59 PM on Monday, September 30, 2019.

Submitting a Course

1. Review the Exemplary Course Program Rubric to familiarize yourself with the criteria.

2. If you do not already have an Ultra course shell to develop your submission, request a blank Ultra course shell and redesign your course. 

• Course shells with existing student data (grades, submissions, discussions, etc.) may not be submitted for the Redesign Challenge.

3. Complete your reflection for each criterion in the rubric.

• Please create a folder called “For the Challenge Team” in your course for licensed tools and platforms that may be unavailable to the reviewers. This folder may also contain screenshots and recordings of great discussion boards, multimedia interactions, test questions, your course design strategy, etc.

4. Submit your course and reflection by the submission deadline.

• Courses will be reviewed by the Instructional Technology team and at least two Ultra Faculty Ambassadors.

The winner will be announced during National Distance Learning Week (November 4-8, 2019). 

About the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program (ECP) Rubric

The ECP rubric defines key characteristics of quality courses within the framework of Course Design, Interaction and Collaboration, Assessment, and Learner Support. It was developed by faculty and leaders in instructional design, based on years of their collective practice and expertise. Thousands of instructors, teachers, instructional designers, and faculty trainers have used the Exemplary Course Program to evaluate and improve their courses with recognized best practices. Those courses meeting exceptionally high standards are recognized at Blackboard’s annual conference.

All participants in the Ultra Course Redesign Challenge will be encouraged to submit their courses to the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program.

On Friday, August 9th starting at 4pm LDAP-Master and Webadmin will be taken down for system maintenance.  During this time account creations and password changes will be unavailable.  Account authentication and logins will not be affected during this downtime.  

The maintenance window will allow staff to apply needed security and application updates.  The outage window is expected to last two hours with services being restored by 5pm on Friday, August 9th.

During the outage window account creations will be queued and then processed upon restoration of services.  If you have any questions or concerns, please contact our Technology Support Center at x53838.

As part of our ongoing commitment to security, the Unix Infrastructure group will be conducting its quarterly system patching on Saturday, August 3rd and Friday, August 9th.  While many of the systems will be patched without any service disruption, there are some systems which require the downtime of key services.  The schedule below outlines which key services will be offline and for how long.

Saturday, 8/3/2019 between 9am and 11am(most systems will only be down for a short period during this time):

• myUMBC lite page will be up resulting in reduced myUMBC functionality
• Wiki will be unavailable
• The sites (wordpress) web hosting environment will be unreachable

Friday, 8/9/2019 between 5pm and 10pm (most systems will only be down for a shorter period during this time): 

• The web hosting environments (virthost) will be partially unavailable (pages will be available but any database calls will not work)
• Access to Cyrus and UMBC Webmail (accounts not migrated to UMBC Gmail)
• All mail will be queued up and delivered after the server is patched
• All HFS (user) servers will be offline
• Certain software licenses will be unavailable (autodesk, cadence, idl, schrodinger, xilinx, mathematica)

Please let us know if you have any concerns or questions.

Thanks!

Tim Champ

Manager of Unix Infrastructure

UMBC DoIT