As we start the new year, we are planning for the next phase of our Blackboard Learn Ultra project.

Over the next 6 months, we will be looking at:

• Enhancements to our course creation process
• Course templates
• Reviewing the Required Minimum Presence

Most of the work for the first part of the year, however, will involve Organisations.

Organisations offer the same functionality as Courses but aren’t used for taught modules.

Typical Organisations include:

• Departmental Organisations which include information for staff and students
• Training Organisations
• Bespoke Organisations as requested

As part of this work, we are reviewing all existing Organisations to reduce their number and ensure they are still required.

We will also be developing a policy to ensure that we have a clear way to manage requests for new Organisations.

We will be contacting owners of Organisations in due course.

If you have any questions or feedback about using Ultra, contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).

In this blogpost we’re outlining a useful feature to help both staff and students navigate their Blackboard Courses.

If you can’t find the content that you’re after or you need to navigate to an area of a course quickly, try using the search function which is available in all courses.

The course search function appears at the top of every Course:

Click on the magnifying glass and start entering the name of the content that you are after.

As you enter the name of the content, the item will appear as a link. Clicking on the link will take you to that area of the module.

Take a look at the screencast below to see this in action:

If you’ve got any questions about Ultra or want to provide feedback on your experience, please contact elearning@aber.ac.uk.

Some of the feedback that we’ve received regarding Blackboard Ultra Courses is that they are not as visually customisable as Blackboard Original Courses. Ultra is created with accessibility in mind which means that some of the features that we previously had, such as textured or coloured backgrounds and text that could result in low colour contrast are no longer available.

In this blogpost we’ll give you some tips that might help make your Blackboard Ultra Courses more visually appealing, including some brand-new features that arrived in the September release.

Learning Modules

Learning Modules work similarly to folders and can be placed on the top level of the Content Page. You can use these to arrange your Learning Materials. One of the developments that arrived recently is the ability to upload images to Learning Modules.

To create a Learning Module, click on the + and Create > Learning Module:

From there, you can Add image to upload an image from the file explorer. Select the image from the File Explorer that opens and upload. Alternatively, you can drag and drop your image into the Learning Module editor. Once you’ve added an image to a Learning Module, it will display as below:

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