The June update to Blackboard brings delegated grading to Ultra courses. Renamed “parallel marking” in Ultra, this feature is designed to minimize bias when paired with anonymous grading. Parallel marking is a valuable tool for high stakes assessments, allowing faculty to evaluate student submissions with two graders and reconcile the results for a final grade.

A new enhancement to the Courses page provides users with an option to view courses in list or grid mode. Stock images randomly display for each course card when grid mode is active. The banner image can be replaced by faculty who would prefer to personalize the course visual. While image does not yet appear in the Ultra course itself, it is an early step toward course personalization.

Other enhancements coming to Ultra on June 7 include:

• The Organizations page will provide better tools to access content including list and grid view, favorites, and filters. Leaders will be able to upload banner images to organization cards to personalize the community experience.

• During the SP2019 semester, the calendar tool was updated to allow sharing content with external services. In June, users can import external calendars, such as Google, to their Blackboard calendar.

As a separately hosted service, Collaborate will be updated about one week earlier. The June release will feature a session inactivity reminder. If attendees in a session are not active after a time, the session ends. This includes activity such as using audio, raising a hand, sharing content, and so on. Inactive attendees in the session see and hear a reminder that the session is open and will close in a minute before they are removed. Additionally, moderators will be able to share files with one or more breakout groups.

The next Blackboard Learn update will be posted to our test site around June 11th and pushed to production around July 11th. 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
• Review your course content with Ally

As part of the recent initiative to convert all staff to Duo (umbc.edu/go/duo), the Division of Information Technology (DoIT) will be automatically requiring Duo for new employees, starting Wednesday, June 5, 2019. This does not affect any current staff, who should already be enrolled, albeit manually by DoIT this past year. However, it does assure all future employees will be using an effective IT security practice.

Generally, this year’s rollout of Duo to all current staff went very smoothly, and our Technology Support Center (TSC) fielded fewer calls or tickets than expected. Similarly, while UMBC was the first to purchase Duo in the USM, both UMB and UMCP now require all faculty and staff to use Duo and experienced minimal issues. Accordingly, DoIT’s goal is for all current and future UMBC employees to be enrolled in Duo, which we’re close to having now.

Finally, DoIT wants to remind all faculty with PeopleSoft access (virtually all faculty) that they will be required to use Duo by Monday, September 30, 2019. Note: The original 9/1/19 deadline was revised to get past the hectic start of term and 10th day add/drop date.

Again, more information about Duo is available at umbc.edu/go/duo. If you have further questions, please contact the Technology Support Center by either submitting a support request atmy.umbc.edu/help or calling (410) 455-3838.