Next month's Blackboard update brings a frequently requested tool to Ultra courses: the Journal!

Journals are a personal space for students to communicate privately with instructors or to reflect on course-related content. Starting in early June, instructors can create a journal assignment on the Ultra Course Content page, add journals to learning modules, and use conditional availability to control access based on date or performance. Students and instructors can discuss the journal entry in comments. 

Ultra Journal assignments can be ungraded or graded. PLEASE NOTE: The initial release includes a very basic grading workflow, where instructors enter grades manually in the gradebook. Although a rubric can be attached to a graded journal assignment, the first phase of the journal tool does not yet support grading with the rubric. Full grading functionality and support for course copy and conversion are expected later this year. Continued enhancements, such as searching and sorting by student, are also coming.

Additional updates to Ultra courses include a new feedback setting for tests and the ability to copy discussions from one Ultra course to another. As with Original courses, Ultra instructors can choose not to show Score per Question feedback to control whether students see the score they earned for each assessment question. The Copy Content tool now supports discussions, allowing instructors to bring a discussion from one Ultra course to another.

The next Blackboard Learn update will be posted to our test site around June 9th and pushed to production around July 2, 2020. Faculty who are interested in test driving new features before they are released to production should open an RT ticket to request early access. 

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

• Academic Continuity | Keep On Teaching | Student Technology Resources
• Check our extensive FAQ collection 
• What’s new in Ultra? | Known Issues 
• Open a ticket via RT
• Follow the Instructional Technology & DoIT myUMBC groups
• Request a consult with instructional technology staff

Based on higher than expected turnout for last week’s prototype of the Planning Instructional Technology for Online Teaching (PIVOT) Live webinars, DoIT is offering a monthly repeat of the five 60-minute webinars in five days approach on the following dates (up to 100 people can participate, but registration via myUMBC is required).

June 22 to 26 at 10 a.m.

July 20 to 24  at 10 a.m. (canceled)

August 10 to 14 at 12:00 p.m.

The PIVOT webinars will include the following topics:

• Organizing & Designing an Online Course 

• Active Learning Strategies

• Engaging Students & Building Online Community

• Reconceptualizing Online Assessments

• Supporting Students and Monitoring Progress

As a reminder, last week’s webinars on these topics were recorded and available on the original announcement and DoIT’s Academic Continuity site (a PIVOT site is also under development). The recordings will also be paired with key instructional technology FAQs to form the basis of PIVOT Solo, which is designed as a totally asynchronous, self-paced to enable a more deliberate approach to online teaching than was the case in Spring 2020. 

Last week’s turnout for the first prototype of the PIVOT webinars included the following:

• We had 1,030 registrations with 764 attendees for one or more sessions (72 people attended all 5 sessions and accounted for 360 attendees).

• There were 263 unique participants during the week, 122 of whom are teaching this summer, which was our most pressing need.

• To date, we've received 100 survey responses from the 263, and  77% rated the webinars as helpful, 8% not-helpful.

As discipline-specific or cohort-based plans develop within Colleges, DoIT will use the PIVOT webinars & PIVOT Solo “playlists” to support such groups, which will inform the synchronous and asynchronous approach of PIVOT + that was previously announced.

In addition to new monthly offerings of PIVOT during the summer, DoIT’s Instructional Technology team has also announced focused training in Blackboard Essentials, Collaborate, Panopto, and VoiceThread, which were popular topics throughout the week. To learn more, visit DoIT’s training site at doit.umbc.edu/training.

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

• Academic Continuity | Keep On Teaching | Student Technology Resources

• Check our extensive FAQ collection 

• What’s new in Ultra? | Known Issues 

• Open a ticket via RT

• Follow the Instructional Technology & DoIT myUMBC groups

Request a consult with instructional technology staff

UPDATE: Bb Annotate has been staged back for deployment — US East Cost is slated for June 3rd.

Available for summer courses, Blackboard’s new inline grading tool, allows instructors, teaching assistants, and graders to embed feedback, such as comments, highlights, and even drawings, directly on a converted view of student assignments in Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and PDF file formats. Bb Annotate’s enhanced commenting tools offer faculty a robust feature set to provide valuable feedback to students about their progress in a course.

The current interface for the inline grading tool is powered by a third-party conversion tool from Box. This version of the feedback tool was rolled out about two years ago. Recognizing the limited functionality of the Box-based tool, Blackboard initiated the development of a new tool last summer. Bb Annotate is the product of extensive research into faculty grading needs.

Available for both Original and Ultra courses, Bb Annotate offers expanded toos to provide customizable feedback to students. Features include a sidebar summary view, highlighting, freehand drawing and shapes, various color selections, a reusable comment bank across courses, and much more. This overview video shares some of the exciting changes: