Previous year courses will remain available (in line with the university’s retention policy). You will be able to access old courses, and course materials using the Courses dropdown menu.
Please note that access to Turnitin submissions from before summer 2022 has changed – read our guidance on downloading Turnitin submissions made before summer 2022.
It’s been a little while since we gave you a progress report on our move to Blackboard Ultra. We’ve been working hard to prepare for the start of our training programme and making sure that our integrations are working.
We have been focusing on our Course Creation process. To help colleagues with the move to Ultra, we are creating courses for next academic year much earlier this year.
This will also help with our training as colleagues will be preparing their live Ultra course.
Our integrations have also taken a lot of work to set up and get working:
These are existing tools but one of the benefits of moving to Ultra is the introduction of Office 365 LTI integration. This allows you to upload documents from your OneDrive straight into Blackboard as well as offering students the opportunity to collaborate on a document together. For those of you who have been following our progress on our blog, you will see that this collaborative tool forms the basis of our Wiki solution.
Our E-learning Essentials: Introduction to Blackboard Ultra training session has now been designed and is ready for staff departmental training sessions.
We have communicated with all Departmental Directors of Learning and Teaching to start arranging your departmental training session. If you are unable to make your scheduled session then we will be running them centrally.
See our training blogpost for an overview of our training package.
As Blackboard Ultra Courses have a completely different approach to organising and arranging content, our Required Minimum Presence has been re-written. Keep a look out for our updated RMP.
We have been working on rationalising and preparing our guidance materials, including our FAQs. One change you’ll notice once we’re in Ultra Courses is that our FAQs will link directly to Blackboard help materials. These materials are available bilingually in Welsh and English.
Our Annual Learning and Teaching Conference is taking place between 4 and 6 July. A key strand of the conference will be the Blackboard Ultra. Keep an eye on our blogposts as we announce our keynote speakers. A reminder that our Call for Proposals closes on 5 May – you can submit a proposal using our online Call for Proposals form.
Anna Udalowska, from Lifelong Learning, has been awarded the Exemplary Course Award for the module XN16710: The Science of Wellbeing.
In addition to the winner, the following modules achieved Highly Commended:
The diverse range of teaching and learning styles evidenced in this year’s applications reflects the innovative work that is taking place across the institution.
The aim of the Exemplary Course Award, now in its eighth year, aims to recognise the very best learning and teaching practices. It gives staff members the opportunity to share their work with colleagues, enhance their current modules in Blackboard, and receive feedback on to improve.
Modules are assessed across 4 areas: course design, interaction and collaboration, assessment, and learner support. The self-assessed nature of the award gives staff the opportunity to reflect on their course and enhance aspects of their module before a panel assesses each application against the rubric.
The panel and the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit would like to thank all of the applicants for the time and effort that they have put into their applications and modules this year.
We’re looking forward to receiving more applications next year and many congratulations to the recipients of this year’s award.
This post outlines the solutions that the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit are working on for Blog activities in Blackboard Ultra. Once these solutions have been tried and tested, we will work on providing guidance for colleagues.
Blogs are a collaborative tool used for a number of assessed and unassessed activities at Aberystwyth University.
The tool is not currently available in Blackboard Ultra (despite our enhancement requests) and is not on Blackboard’s roadmap of development.
The unavailability of the Blog tool has been included in all parts of the decision-making process to highlight it as a risk in the move to Blackboard Ultra.
In their very nature blogs offer students the opportunity to reflect on their learning, organise their thoughts and ideas chronologically, and comment on each other’s posts.
Whilst there aren’t blogs in Ultra, there are two fully-integrated participation and engagement tools that will offer alternatives: Journals and Discussions.
Whilst blogs don’t exist in Blackboard Ultra, the journal tool does remain. Journals are used in a similar way to blogs but they are private between course tutors and students. If the activity can function without making student’s posts visible to all, we recommend using this tool.
You can get an overview of the journal tool by watching this Journal overview tutorial.
If the activity requires an interactive element between students then we recommend using the discussion tool. Here you can create a thread, organise your discussions via folders, set the discussions to be graded, encourage student participation by not viewing the thread until students have completed their initial post.
For an idea as to how discussions work, take a look at this demonstration video.
Even though our discussion board tool has changed, our principles on discussion board design and engagement still remain the same. Take a look at our discussion board design blogpost for some tips and questions for you to ask yourselves in the design of the activity.
Whilst we recommend that discussion board activity remains in Blackboard so that student engagement and assessment can take place, there is another blogging tool supported by the University: WordPress. If you think that WordPress is the only option for you then we recommend that you get in contact with us first to discuss your activity and so we can advise further (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
In this blogpost we’ll be outlining the training that we’ve been designing ready for the move to Blackboard Ultra.
We will be offering every department an E-learning Essentials: Introduction to Blackboard Ultra training session. We will be liaising with your departmental director of learning and teaching to arrange this, offering either an online or an in-person session.
In this session, we will outline what colleagues need to do to get their modules ready for September. The main outcome of this session is that colleagues will be able to achieve the Required Minimum Presence. The session includes some design tips, an overview of the analytics available in Blackboard Ultra, as well as how to create Turnitin submission points, links to your reading list, and Panopto links. We’ll introduce you to the updated interactive tools: Discussions and Journals. In addition to this, we’ll look at the new workflow for creating Blackboard Assignments and Blackboard Tests, and the Grade Book.
If you cannot make your departmental session, then we are also offering them centrally.
To complement this session, we are running some centrally organised E-learning Enhanced Sessions:
These sessions will be advertised on our course booking site.
If the session is taking place online then a Teams link will be emailed to you.
If you have any questions about our move to Blackboard Ultra, then do contact elearning@aber.ac.uk.
This blogpost outlines the solutions that the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit are working on for Wiki activities. Once these solutions have been tried and tested, we will work on providing guidance for colleagues.
Wikis are a collaborative tool used for a number of assessed and unassessed activities at Aberystwyth University.
The tool is not currently available in Blackboard Ultra (despite our enhancement requests) and is not on Blackboard’s roadmap of development.
The unavailability of the Wiki tool has been included in all parts of the decision-making process to highlight it as a risk in the move to Blackboard Ultra.
In their very nature wikis are collaborative giving students the opportunity to contribute as part of a group. Students can produce media rich resources linking to external content, videos, and images. The content can be arranged over a number of pages, with a structure pre-given by the tutor.
This blogpost outlines a number of options for Wiki equivalences. The options are listed in order of LTEU preference.
On 1 and 2 March, LTEU met with Departmental Directors of Learning and Teaching to update on the Blackboard Ultra project and discuss our plans for training, ways in which we can address challenges, and the support required for the Ultra project.
The slides from the session can be downloaded from this link.
The slides include an update on the project timeline, what academic colleagues will have to do, and an overview of our training approach.
If you have any questions, concerns, or want to speak to us about something specific in your course, then contact us on elearning@aber.ac.uk.
Now that the templates have been confirmed we have created an individual Ultra Practice Course for all staff members.
This practice course is private to you and has no students enrolled on it. You can use this course to create content and try out the new Ultra course interface.
You will find your practice course by going to Organisations on the left-hand side menu:
The course has been created with the bilingual AU course template. For further information on course templates, see our previous blogpost. They will be named your name Cwrs Ymarfer Ultra / Ultra Practice Course.
To help prepare you for Ultra courses next academic year, try the following:
You’ll notice that you can drag and drop content much more easily in Ultra. Additionally, you can choose where you add content (without newly created content defaulting to the bottom of the page).
As Ultra is much more fluid than Blackboard original, your approach to content organisation is essential to help students navigate the module. Make sure that you use the preview features so that you can get an idea of how the content looks to students:
It might be that you want to discuss content organisation with colleagues to see if there’s departmental approach that you want to take.
We will be using these practice organisations for training purposes over the coming months. Keep an eye on our blog and webpages for additional information as further guidance is produced.
We’ll be blogging additional tasks over the coming months for you to try in your Ultra practice course. In our next blogpost of this nature, we’ll be taking an in-depth look at the Grade Book, Assignments, Turnitin, and Blackboard tests.
If you’ve got any questions about the move to Blackboard Ultra, please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit has been working to confirm the templates that will be used in new Ultra courses.
Unlike previous years, there will no longer be departmental templates. Following the decision by Academic Enhancement Committee and consultation with Associate Deans of Welsh-Medium Academic Provision, 3 templates have been created for Ultra:
The template that your course will have is determined on the language of delivery for the module recorded in AStRA.
Courses with language delivery of 100 Welsh will be created with a Welsh template. Courses with NULL or 0 will have an English template. If the score is between 1 and 99, a bilingual template will be used. Unlike Blackboard Original Menus, the course templates can be edited by instructors.
The course content template is comprised of 3 folders:
An image of the bilingual template is below:
The next stage in our Ultra Project is to create practice organisations for all staff. These organisations will be a space where you can look at Ultra functionality and copy course content from existing modules. We will also be making use of these practice organisations in our staff training programme that will be communicated with you over the coming months.
If you have any questions about the Ultra project, then please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
It’s been a little while since we updated you on what we’ve been up to with Blackboard Ultra since we launched Ultra Base Navigation at the beginning of January.
We’ve been working with our colleagues at Blackboard to help finalise our course template. Unlike previous years, we’ll be having one course template for all modules and all modules in 2023 will be created blank to assist with the move to Ultra.
We’ve updated our Required Minimum Presence for Blackboard which is going to the Academic Enhancement Committee for approval and feedback. We’ve also been exploring how Welsh and English templates will work together in Ultra. Once we’ve got the template and RMP agreed, we’ll start the process of creating your Ultra Practice Courses so that you can see what Ultra will look like and begin to start thinking about your teaching ready for September 2023.
Our outreach work will continue at the start of next month as we will host focus groups with Departmental Directors of Learning and Teaching and Associate Deans for Learning and Teaching to start discussing what types of training you will require and how best to help you with the Ultra course rollout.
From a technical perspective, we’ve been looking into ways in which Panopto folders will provision with Ultra courses as well as Talis Aspire reading lists.
As part of our work with Blackboard, they have provided us a with a course readiness report which helps us to identify how prepared we currently are for Ultra courses. We’ve started exploring Wiki and Blog equivalences for those of you who currently use these tools in teaching, as well as Blackboard Test question equivalences for those questions that aren’t available in Ultra.
We will be updating our webpages with additional support and guidance materials as we go. If you have got any questions about our move to Ultra Courses then you are welcome to contact us (elearning@aber.ac.uk).