Related FAQ - Where is my summer course after the Ultra Experience upgrade?

Blackboard's navigation to courses will be upgraded on Friday, May 25, 2018 beginning at 3 PM EST as part of DoIT’s routine Blackboard maintenance. This upgrade will modernize the overall dashboard with the new Ultra Experience base navigation.

Important: Courses will NOT change in appearance or functionality.

No downtime is expected, but the login page located at blackboard.umbc.edu will be temporarily unavailable while it is also updated by DoIT. Faculty, staff, and students can still log into Blackboard by clicking on the Blackboard icon via myUMBC or going to my.umbc.edu/go/blackboard.

Once the Blackboard upgrade is complete, please clear your Internet browser cache and cookies before logging in using these step-by-step instructions. 

How does the Ultra Experience change Blackboard for faculty & students?

Blackboard course shells for SU2018 were created on April 25, 2018

About Course Creation

Bb shells for SU2018 are available for all courses (designated as lecture, lab, field or discussion) listed in the UMBC Schedule of Classes (SOC), provided that there is an instructor of record listed. As new course sections and/or instructors are added to the SOC by Department Scheduling Coordinators, corresponding Bb shells are automatically generated overnight. 

• If you are an instructor, and your name is not associated with the course you are teaching in the SOC, please see your Departmental Scheduling Coordinator to resolve the issue. Once you are listed in the SOC, your Bb course shell will be created automatically. 
• If you and your Department Scheduling Coordinator believe you are correctly assigned as the instructor of record in the SOC and you do not see your course shell in Blackboard, please submit a Request Tracker (RT) ticket via my.umbc.edu/help.
• If you need a Bb shell for a research or independent study course, please submit a new course request.

Instructors who teach multiple sections of the same course will find those enrollments merged into one Bb course shell. These sections may be split upon request by an RT ticket, which we recommend submitting at least one week before the semester starts, if not as soon as courses are created in Blackboard.

Student enrollment in Bb mirrors the official registration in SA and updates hourly. However, courses are not accessible to students by default until the instructor of record makes them available.

As always, if you have any questions, please consider the following options:

• Check our extensive FAQ collection
• Open a ticket via RT
• Follow the Instructional Technology & DoIT myUMBC groups
• Request a consult with instructional technology staff

Respondus will be presenting a special training webinar that focuses on the advanced features of LockDown Browser on Tuesday, April 24th at 1 PM ET.

LockDown Browser is a custom browser that locks down the testing environment within a learning management system.

During this training webinar, Respondus will show how to allow students to use ebooks, spreadsheets, and calculators during an online test, and it will cover some best practices as well.

DoIT is now providing NVivo, a qualitative research software package equivalent to SPSS, Stata, SAS, or R. This software is available to all faculty, staff, and graduate students. It allows the user to import, code, and arrange data for methodologically rigorous and scalable analyses. This acquisition aligns with efforts to support UMBC's strategic plan, including the objective to "vigorously promote a campus culture of multidisciplinary collaboration and multidisciplinary research, scholarship, and creative activity."

Professor Anne Brodsky of the Department of Psychology, who also serves as Interim Director, Maryland Institute for Policy Analysis and Research (MIPAR) and Special Assistant for Social Science Research with the CAHSS Dean's Office, has been conducting qualitative research since arriving at UMBC 20 years ago. She believes this procurement is "great news for UMBC researchers and students" and access to NVivo "will further promote the excellent qualitative and mixed methods scholarship being done across the Social Sciences, Humanities, Arts, and STEM fields at UMBC as we work to further our understanding into some of the most important and exciting questions of our time."

If you are considering qualitative or mixed-methods research, or you are currently gathering qualitative data, this might be just the tool you're looking for to systematize your analytic strategy.

NVivo can be downloaded at https://wiki.umbc.edu/display/faq/Software