We’re delighted to welcome a number of external speakers at this year’s Learning and Teaching Conference.
View our full programme and book your place online.
On Tuesday 4 July, we’ll be joined in person by colleagues from Blackboard.
Colleagues will have the opportunity to hear about future developments, work on and enhance their blackboard ultra modules, and provide feedback to the company on enhancements.
Please see below for our speakers’ biographies.
Now that the 2023-24 modules are available to staff, we can link them together at the module co-ordinator’s request. This process is known as parent-childing. Linking modules together is an effective way of dealing with separate modules with the same content so you don’t have to upload materials to two or more different modules.
This process makes one module the parent, whilst the other module(s) become a child. There’s no limit on how many modules you make a child but there can only be one parent. The parent-child facility works in the same way with Blackboard Ultra.
If you’d like to parent-child your modules, and you’re the module co-coordinator, contact elearning@aber.ac.uk with the module codes for the parent and child modules.
Many members of staff are currently using parent-child modules across the institution. Some examples are:
Essentially, any module that shares the same content is ideal for parent-childing.
Students will see the name of the module that they are enrolled on (even if it’s the child module) when they log into Blackboard but they will see all the content placed in the parent module. Instructors will not be able to place content in the child module.
Now, before the start of term and whilst module content is being built, is the perfect time for linking your modules. Whilst the linking of modules does save time in the loading of materials, there are some things to consider:
Whilst all content is automatically visible once the modules are merged, you can use groups and adaptive release if you only want the content to be visible to a specific module cohort. This might be useful, for example, if you have a 2nd year and 3rd year module merged but your students on the different modules have separate assignments. You can use groups – 1 for the 2nd year students and one for 3rd year students and limit who can see the assignment information and submission point. Follow our guidance on creating a group and adaptive release (known as ‘release conditions’ in Ultra) if you wish to do this.
Once the merging takes place, all students will appear in the Grade Book (previously known as Grade Centre in Blackboard Original) of the parent module. You can, however, determine whether they are enrolled on the child module as this information displays against the student in the Grade Book columns.
If you’d like further information on this process or have any specific questions then please contact us (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
One of the great new enhancements that we’ve got in Blackboard Ultra is the ability to embed collaborative documents.
For those of us who did much of their teaching online during the Covid pandemic, you will recall us espousing the benefits of loading a collaborative document in the chat. We’ve now been working to enable this on our Blackboard Courses and we are pleased to say that they are available for you to use on your 2023-24 courses.
This means that your students will be able to collaborate together outside the classroom, on Blackboard in their own time. There are 3 types of document available for students to collaborate on:
We’re going to be using the collab docs for blog and wiki alternatives. But, if you want to maybe get your students to mind map, generate ideas, or build on each other’s notes, take a look at the collab docs. You could also use it to get students to sign up to groups. You can use the group feature in Ultra courses to limit the item to a specific student or group of students.
Want to know how to do it? Take a look at Blackboard’s guidance on Microsoft OneDrive and collaborative documents.
In preparation for our move to Ultra, the University’s Blackboard Required Minimum Presence has been updated and approved by Academic Enhancement Committee.
We revisit all our policies annually, but the move to Blackboard Ultra has meant that we have spent longer preparing the RMP.
The full RMP 2023-24 is now available on our webpages.
Some of the changes to the RMP are listed below:
We have now started our Departmental Ultra training programme and hope to see you over the coming weeks. If you can’t attend your session then we are running a series of centrally organised sessions for all staff to join.
If you’ve got any questions about Ultra, please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
When you come back for next academic year, your new courses in Blackboard will look a little different. From September 2023, all new courses in Blackboard will be Ultra courses.
We’ve been using Ultra Base Navigation (UBN) in Blackboard since January 2023, and we know that many of you have found it easier to use – especially on mobile devices.
Ultra courses have the same accessible and mobile-friendly design as UBN – here’s what an Ultra course looks like:
Because of the way it’s designed, an Ultra course never has more than two levels of folders – this makes it much quicker and easier to find your course materials and assignment submission links. And there’s also a search tool inside every course.
We’ve also redesigned our course template to make sure it uses the language that the course is taught in. If your module is taught in Welsh, your course template will now be in Welsh. And bilingual modules have a bilingual course template.
There’s lots of information about Ultra on the Blackboard website, including an introduction to navigating your way round an Ultra course (note – the video on this page is on an external site and only available in English).
All your previous years’ courses are still available – so if you need to look back at old course materials, you can do that too.
The Blackboard Ultra Courses for the Academic Year 2023-24 have now been created blank using the pre-agreed University template.
The early creation of Ultra Courses is the next phase in our move to Blackboard Ultra and prepares us for training over the coming months.
To access your courses for next academic year, click on Upcoming Courses:
You will see any courses that you are listed as an instructor on as well as courses that you might support as departmental administrators.
If you don’t see a course that you are meant to be teaching on then check with your departmental administrator – it might be that you haven’t been added to the module record in the Module Management System. We are updating this feed every Tuesday morning so you can expect to see your modules on a Tuesday afternoon once the update has gone through.
The courses are currently private and will be made available on 1 September 2023. Students won’t appear on your courses until they have completed their registration.
Departmental Directors of Learning and Teaching have been contacted to arrange a training session for your department.
If you want to get started on setting up your courses, you might want to:
The next phase of the move to Ultra is focusing on training and making sure that our support materials are up-to-date. See our overview of training for further information.
If you have any questions about Blackboard Ultra, please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
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).