Support materials to assist students with Blackboard Learn Ultra are now available on our webpages.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit have produced a Student Guide specifically for Ultra which can be downloaded.
Students were notified of the change to Blackboard before the end of last academic year.
As part of the move to Ultra our FAQs are in the process of being updated.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is pleased to announce that Information Services has procured Blackboard Ally as part of our move to Blackboard Learn Ultra.
Blackboard Ally integrates into our Blackboard Learn Ultra environment and focuses on making digital content more accessible.
For colleagues creating content you will be able to amend the accessibility of your content. This means that your content will be more accessible to assistive technologies, such as screen readers.
Another benefit of Blackboard Ally is that content can be downloaded in multiple formats. This means that your lecture notes, PowerPoints, and other documents can be converted into many different formats, including:
There’s nothing that you need to do to enable Ally on your course. It will automatically be enabled on Monday 11 September on 2023-24 Courses onwards and Organisations.
For more information on using Blackboard Ally, take a look at our staff or student FAQ.
If you want to know further information about creating accessible learning materials, take a look at our resources.
One of the benefits of moving to Blackboard Learn Ultra is the increased enhancements to the virtual learning environment.
In this blogpost, we will outline some of the new functionality available in this month’s update.
The location to manage the Groups feature has changed. You can now access this directly from the top menu of your course:
See groups guidance for additional information.
You can now add images to Learning Modules.
Learning Modules offer a way for you to organise your content. For further information, see Learning Modules guidance.
To ensure that your content is as accessible as possible, use the accessibility checker.
As you create your content, your accessibility score will be generated to alert you to any changes that you might want to make.
When it comes to grading tests, you can now grade by question or student in Ultra. See Blackboard’s test guidance and flex grading for further information.
For other updates this month, take a look at Blackboard’s Release notes.
If you’ve got any questions about using any of these features or Blackboard Learn Ultra, contact elearning@aber.ac.uk.
On 1 August Information Services roll their systems over to prepare for the next Academic Year (2023-24).
Blackboard Courses are now no different. On the 1 August, the term dates for 2023-24 become live.
This means that Courses 2023-24 are no longer listed as Private but are now available. It also means that they will not display in Upcoming Courses.
2023-24 Courses can now be accessed from the homepage. If you wish to only see your 2023-24 courses, use the toggle at the top or filter by courses.
You can favourite your course so that it appears at the top of the page by clicking on the star:
Students won’t come onto your course until they have completed their registration.
If you’ve got any questions about Ultra, please contact elearning@aber.ac.uk.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit has now completed their cycle of departmental training sessions for E-learning Essentials: Introduction to Blackboard Ultra.
This training session was designed to ensure that staff had the opportunity to familiarise themselves with Blackboard Ultra and achieve the Blackboard Required Minimum Presence.
Since May, we have trained over 300 members of staff in both in person and online sessions.
For those of you at the first day of the conference you will have seen the exciting features that are coming to Blackboard Ultra over the next few years.
If you haven’t managed to attend one of your departmental sessions or would like a refresher, then we are running the sessions in English and Welsh online.
You can book onto our training sessions and view other sessions on the booking page.
If you have any questins about Ultra then email elearning@aber.ac.uk
The big news since our last update on the Blackboard Ultra project is that we have started departmental training sessions. It’s been great getting to meet staff and demonstrate the basics of using Ultra. To date 200 people have attended a session, and we’ve got more sessions lined up over the summer.
If you’re not able to attend your departmental training session, then we’ve got a number of centrally organised ones for you to join.
In addition to this, and to make sure that colleagues have access to full Ultra functionality, we’ve got the following sessions scheduled (available in Welsh and English):
You can view our sessions and book your place on the course booking page.
We’re also working behind the scenes on our integrations with other tools. At the moment, we are working on making it easier for you to find the correct academic year Panopto folder when you create recordings. We think that this is going to make things much easier when teaching starts again. Keep an eye out for news on this.
We’re looking forward to welcoming colleagues from Anthology / Blackboard and Bangor University to the annual learning and teaching conference. We’ve got a whole day of Ultra-related events on 4th July. If you haven’t booked your place at the conference, you can do it on our conference webpages.
If you’ve got any questions about Ultra, contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
To complement the keynote sessions from Blackboard, we’re delighted to welcome colleagues from Bangor University: Bethan Wyn Jones and Alan Thomas.
View our full programme and book your place online.
One thing that we were keen on having as part of the conference is to hear about colleagues’ experience of moving over to Blackboard Ultra. Bangor have been using Ultra since 2020.
Please see below for their biographies:
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.