Student Preview & Question Banks Come to Ultra in May

Thu, 02 May 2019 10:27:25 -0400
ally, blackboard, ultra-experience, ultra-update

A core feature in an Original Blackboard course, Student Preview is used by faculty to review the content and tool functionality in a virtual environment before releasing to students -- and it is coming to Ultra courses in May.

Instructors can also import question banks exported from Original courses and publisher-created test banks to their Ultra courses. Once imported, these questions are available for immediate use and reuse across all assessments in the Ultra 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.

Other enhancements coming to Ultra on May 3 include:

Instructors can leave feedback for individual group members and for the group as a whole for a graded activity

The link to the Course Room will be renamed to Blackboard Collaborate

Initially deployed to Ultra courses in SP2019, the new accessibility tool Ally will be available to all new courses beginning with summer 2019. Ally automatically scans course content and performs a series of steps to make that content more accessible. Ally is one part of a broad investment to support accessibility, hybrid and online learning, and instructional technology in DoIT. Moreover, this strategic investment extends the timeline for Ultra and provides a $100 stipend to faculty to convert a course to Ultra.

While many features released each month benefit Ultra courses, all users can now share Blackboard calendars with external calendar services such as Google.

The next update will be posted to our test site around May 14th and pushed to production around June 6th. 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:

Check our extensive FAQ collection

What’s new in Ultra? | Known Issues | About Ultra

Open a ticket via RT

Follow the Instructional Technology & DoIT myUMBC groups

Request a consult with instructional technology staff