What's New in Learn Ultra

This release features a variety of improvements. Some enhancements center on assessment and grading and better, more efficient workflows. Other features focus on refinement based on instructor, student, and administrator feedback.

This release has lots of features to consider. Educators focus on many areas as they design high-quality, engaging courses. This release has improvements for instructors and students around assessment. Other features focus on intuitive and time-saving workflows and surfacing data insights.

In the March release Blackboard includes new features that improve the learner and instructor experience for assessment, and grading. We have made a series of improvements to the workflows related to learning modules including Microsoft OneDrive document linking. These improvements are more intuitive and provide time-saving efficiencies for instructors.

The February release includes several new features. Pronoun Customisation now includes a new field so that users can include pronunciation and even add a short audio clip. Granular course copy in an Ultra course now includes content from Original courses.

This month's release includes updates for Bb Annotations, Ally File Transformer in Blackboard Assist (global availability) and Blackboard Assist (business/government availability).

Point-based and point-range rubrics now provide increased flexibility for grading. Accommodations support instructors to specify extra time for students on timed assessments. Banner images now have the option of an image description. Group Sets provide an option to change the visibility for custom or random group sets. Instructors and grader roles can improve their productivity using BB Annotations.

The visual appeal of courses has a major boost this month with the course card image from base navigation now able to be used as a course banner in Ultra courses. As part of planned diversity, equity, and inclusion improvements, this release gives institutions the option to allow users to express their personal pronouns. Blackboard is also excited to announce continued improvements to the recently released Microsoft Teams classes integration, solidifying our commitment to providing best-in-class tools and technologies for the Ultra Course View.

You can now add a table in the Rich Text Editor! This has been a much-asked-for feature and we are really happy to make it available in this release. Students need a way to ensure their work has been correctly submitted into the system. The new Submission Receipt feature in Ultra provides students with a unique tracking number. We are conscious of the different pedagogical approaches and practices. To reflect this we have increased the numbers of columns and rows available in Rubrics. This will support institutions and instructors who prefer to grade students with a greater level of granularity.

Evaluating student-submitted content is a continuous job critical to the learning process. We know it's important to instructors and graders to improve the content view and create a practical grading process. That's why we keep enhancing grading workflows. The assessment experience for Students now includes improvements to the handling of Peer Review Assignments for disabled students, the assignment attempts screen, partial credit for fill in the Blank Questions, and an additional content section for assessments. We know communication is key and this release also has updates to email communication in Learn Ultra.

This release includes a number of updates for Ultra Course View. We dive into the deep and seamless integrations between Microsoft Teams Classes and Ultra. There are improvements to the Ultra Calendar as well as advanced filtering options for the Gradebook, submission linking, and calendar links for Ultra Peer Review. Students can now mark and track progress and the student experience is improved with a new navigation menu!

This month's release brings several enhancements to the Gradebook for Learn Ultra including; the ability to remove the overall grade prompt, a new percentage option for overall grades, control of the visibility of Attendance columns, and a redesign of the group set configuration page to improve performance and stability of large courses. We have also improved our integration for third-party tools with Course Role Mapping to LTU Context Roles.

In this release for Ultra Course View, we are continuing to expand options for Assessment Feedback with feedback by criterion. Audio/visual recordings bring a new level of personalisation to learning and can be included in Announcements as well as in feedback to students. We are continuing to build functionality for Peer Assessment with notifications for both Instructors and Students appearing in the Activity Stream and the ability for Instructors to Batch Edit peer review items. There are also improvements to Course Auto-Archive performance.

We are pleased to announce the delivery of a proctoring framework to allow proctoring providers to integrate their solutions with native Learn Ultra assessment flow. In the Ultra Experience and Ultra Course View, instructors can now drop grades inside categories for overall grade calculations.

This month's release is jam-packed with new features! It includes improvements for Peer Review and Peer Assessment, conditional availability to content by users and groups, the ability to disable notifications for users with high enrollments, Rich Text Editor improvements, and scripts to bulk download course archives.

This month's release features enhancements for EMAIL and SMS notification messages for all Users and an improved grading flow for Instructors using rubrics.

This update is short and sweet. We look into the New Tab Navigation for Blackboard Ultra Learn.

The new Rich text editor for Ultra has arrived, plus improved workflows for administrators like the building block self-service. 

With this release, Instructors are now equipped with additional tools to boost student engagement for example improvements to Ultra’s Rich text editor, feedback timing control, HTML/CSS code blocks, student list view and journals.

Academic effectiveness is vital to deliver engaging teaching and learning experiences. In this release instructors now can embed Office 365 documents into the rich text editor, display seconds in quiz timer and benefit from new improvements to the student list view and the overall grade column.

Building a more inclusive learning environment is vital for student success, so with this release the Ally tool can be used directly in Ultra Courses.

Helping instructors save time and reinforcing academic integrity are the key highlights of this release. Instructors can now create automated test question feedback, send course announcements via email, view grades using the student list view, create password protected assessments, and much more.

Enhancements to the text editor and Journals are two of the top reasons this release is worth checking out.

Administrators, you’re going to love the new support panel released this month. But we didn’t stop there. Read more about Learn's new system permissions, enhancements to course discussions, and more.

Journals are here! This month’s release also introduces further enhancements to discussions, assessment scoring and media embedding.

Announcing Bb Annotate! Your instructors are going to love Bb Annotate, our new tool for inline assignment grading. Just wait until they see all it can do.

Accommodations for global calendar variances, simpler content creation, and expanded group self-enrollment are just some the highlights of this new release.

The highly-requested Calculated formula question type for Ultra Courses is now available! Plus, this release is packed full of many small, but meaningful changes that will positively impact usability for all — administrators, instructors and students alike.

Your instructors will be especially thrilled to see the new enhancements to student groups introduced in this release. Improvements like these continue to help make teaching and learning better.

The ability for robust group work just got even better with this release as instructors are now able to create group sets and align them to discussions, tests, and assignments. Plus, you’ll like seeing the additional functionality added based on community feedback.