The April release introduce several new features aimed at improving content management, grading flexibility, and student feedback tracking. 

Instructors and students can now print Ultra Documents or save them as PDFs. This feature facilitates offline content review, sharing with peers, or creating physical copies. Note that if knowledge checks are included and already completed, they will display selected answers and instructor feedback when printed.

Image 1: Example of new print Ultra Document feature

A major addition this month is the Learning Object Repository (LOR), designed to centralize resources across courses and organizations. Instructors can copy objects from the LOR while maintaining control over settings such as availability. Updates made to objects in the LOR are automatically reflected across associated courses, making it easier to manage institutional content like policy documents.

Content Creation & Management

• When performing a whole course copy, achievements are now automatically included, allowing instructors to maintain consistent recognition across course iterations. However, achievements are not included in granular content copies.
• Instructors can now access Achievements through the Student Preview.

Assessments & Grading

• Flexible Grading is introduced for group assignments and tests. Though some features (like per-question feedback on group tests) are not yet available, this update is part of ongoing improvements to group grading.
• A new feedback indicator on the student Overview page now shows whether students have reviewed their feedback. The indicator updates from “Not reviewed” to “Reviewed” with a timestamp, giving instructors greater insight into student engagement with their feedback.
• A new “Results” column in the Gradebook replaces the “Feedback” column, making it more intuitive for students to view their grades and feedback.

Faculty should see the latest updates in their Ultra courses around April 4-5 2025. The next update to our Ultra test environment will take place on April 8, 2025; release notes are posted to the What's New in Ultra that same week. Faculty who are interested in test driving new features before they are released to production should open an RT ticket to request early access. Please watch the FAQs, including the What's New with Ultra page, and myUMBC for additional information about Ultra.

Curious about the all latest features in Ultra? Join our What's New in Ultra Courses for Teaching & Learning SU2025 webinar on May 12, 2025.

We just posted some changes you'll enjoy:

Community Menu

• The Your Groups section will now grow to show all of your groups without scrolling.

Groups

• Groups can now subscribe to a Flickr Photoset and have those photos pulled into the Media tool. (see Settings -> Subscriptions)

After a bit of a break, I'm pleased to announce the upcoming release of a new feature for myUMBC: Group Notifications.

One thing we've heard from group members is that once they join a group, they have to repeatedly go back to the group page to see what's new.  To make life easier, whenever new content is posted to a group, myUMBC will send a short email to all group members with a link to the new post. In addition to an email, when you log in to myUMBC, you will see a summary of new posts in the Activity dashboard in the upper-right of myUMBC next to your name.

Notification Settings

There will also be new page under your personal settings that will allow you to configure when and from whom you receive notifications:

• You will have to option of when to receive email notifications: immediately (the default), daily, or never. Even if you choose "never" you will still see the notifications in the Activity dashboard.
• You will be able to choose which groups you want to receive notifications from.  If you uncheck a group, you will receive no emails or entries in your Activity dashboard.

We hope this will make it easier for people to remain engaged with their groups, while providing an easy way to prevent yourself from being overrun with email.

We expect to enable group notifications some time this weekend.

We look forward to your feedback.

Collier

We just posted an update with the following changes:

• Group Subscriptions - Groups can now subscribe to other groups. When you subscribe, your group will pull in the public content from the group you're subscribe too.  This provides a great way for groups to share content with one another without having to post content in two different groups.  Spotlights, News, Events, Discussions and Media are supported, but the content must be marked "public" to be seen in another group.
• Groups Page - The Groups page now looks a little better with more emphasis on publicly visible groups.
• Dashboard Tweak - To address some confusion we changed the name of "Groups" to "Activity" and gave it a cool lightning bolt arrow icon.  This was done to better reflect what this dashboard will show you... recent activity.  Our plan is for this dashboard to show you new content in your groups, and comments/paws on your public content.
• Events Tweaks
• Events now default to an hour long if you change the time, instead of just 5 minutes.
• You can now add up to 99999 seats for an event instead of 99.
• Bug Fixes
• You can no longer post empty comments... whew
• Group Pages should no longer throw errors
• Fixed a bug that send you to calendar view when browsing group events.
• Miscellaneous typos and fixes

Later this week...

• Media is shaping up nicely and should be available before the end of the week.  We think you're gonna like it.
• We'll add the ability for groups to subscribe to external content like RSS, YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr feeds

If you're reading this, the group works!

Thanks for taking a second to check out the myUMBC Fan Club group.  We're going to use this group as our way to stay connected to you UMBC community.

So What's Going On With myUMBC?

I'm glad you asked.  A lot.

First off, let me apologize for any inconvenience over the past few weeks as we had to turn some features of myUMBC off in order to upgrade them for the Fall.  The new myUMBC is about a bazillion times more complicated than the old one and we're trying to ensure that when students flood back in late August that everything is going to work smoothly.  We're still expecting a few hiccups, but we're working hard to minimize them.

We have an official launch window: Aug 14th - 15th.  Its called a window because we're going to try and do it on the 14th, but if things go wrong (and they will), it may take until the 15th to get things back up and running.

There is still a ton of things left to do, though. Until the start of the semester, every day or two we will try and push out new features, content and bug fixes.  If you run into any problems with the new myUMBC, let me know as soon as you can.  We'll try and get the bugs squashed ASAP.

What's This Groups Thing?

Groups are the biggest and most ambitious new feature of myUMBC.  They will hopefully provide a simple and easy way for the UMBC to connect and collaborate.  Groups can be used for student org advertising and planning, simple websites for organizations, or collaboration areas for committees.  We've purposefully made the tools in Groups simple and straightforward, because we don't need to be the best (there are plenty of tools online that are better at any given task), we just need to help the parts of the community that need help.  As the community uses Groups, we'll be paying attention and adding and modifying features in order to best meet UMBC's needs.

As I've mentioned, each group consists of a set of "tools" you can use:

• Home - a simple page showcasing the latest content from your group
• Spotlights - spotlights, but just for your group
• News - a blog
• Events - a calendar
• Pages - a wiki

We've recently pushed out the two biggest (and most critical) tools of groups: Members and Discussions.

• Members lets you manage the members of your group... that's all, but its kinda important.
• Discussions lets you have discussions with your members.  Its like a forum, but with some added myUMBC mojo.  You can create three types of discussions:
• General - talk about stuff in a free form discussion
• Question - ask a question, then select one of the replies as an answer
• Poll - ask a question and let people to vote on their preference

Going Public

An important function of groups is the ability to make your content "public". Any spotlight, news, event, discussion, media can be marked as public and will appear under their respective section of the Community menu.  This makes it easy for your group to advertise their content to the entire UMBC community.  Once content is made public, it can be pawed and commented on by anyone logged in to myUMBC.

So, if your group is planning an event, post it to your group calendar with tentative dates while you work out the details and when things are finalized, make it public, and then send your group members out to paw the event so it appears on the myUMBC Start page.

Coming Soon

We're now working on the last remaining parts of groups:

• Media - Share the videos and photos you've posted on various sharing sites like YouTube, Vimeo and Flickr.
• Categories - Allow you to categorize content within your group.  Think of them as Topics, but just for your group.
• Subscriptions - Automatically pull in content from external sites, like Blogger or Tumblr via RSS.  You can also pull in content from other groups, which provides a great way for groups to work together to cross-advertise news and events.  You can even subscribe to YouTube, Vimeo, and Flickr feeds and the images/videos appear in Media.

Thanks for everyone's understanding and support,

Collier

PS - The image is by one of my favorite artists, David Lanham.  I think it accurately represents what the past two years have felt like as we've worked on myUMBC.