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:
Word
Excel
PowerPoint
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.
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.
We have not specified a Learning Materials folder owing to the two-level of folder restrictions in Ultra
Colleagues have the option to create a structure that meets their needs.
The Assessment and Feedback folder remains the same as before and is pre-populated with:
Guidance for students on submitting their work and finding their feedback.
Regulation on Unacceptable Academic Practice
Link to the Referencing and Plagiarism LibGuide
Link to Past Exam Papers
The Aspire Reading List link should be on the content page of the module and no more than 6 folder levels down. If you have questions about your reading lists, please contact your Subject Librarians.
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).
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:
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.
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.
Technical Update
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:
Panopto: Panopto has been moved to an API connector ready for Ultra Courses.
Talis Aspire: Talis Aspire LTI is now enabled. We have been working with colleagues in Academic Engagement to ensure that this is as smooth as possible.
Turnitin: Work on moving Turnitin to a LTI connector was completed in summer 2022, and no additional changes to Turnitin are required for the move to Ultra Courses.
Microsoft Teams meetings: We will move to the Teams LTI in summer 2023. This tool will be for scheduling Teams meetings.
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.
Training Update
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.
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.
Guidance Materials
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.
Annual Learning and Teaching Conference
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.
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.
Background
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.
Option 1: Use the Journal tool
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.
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.
Option 3: Use WordPress blogging tool
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:
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.
Background
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.
Summary of discussions
Support contact – if you are having any difficulties with using e-learning tools then do contact elearning@aber.ac.uk and we will be happy to help you out.
Adding Reading List and Panopto Link – Staff members will have to add links to these in their modules. There is currently no way of doing this automatically, but we will continue to investigate ways of doing so.
Departments will be able to choose whether they have an in-person training session or an online training session.
LTEU will continue training on using Ultra over the summer and into the new academic year
Academic colleagues will be able to access and copy materials from historical modules – the current retention period is 5 years + current year.
Where possible, colleagues should use Blackboard text editor features to ensure that their content is as accessible as possible.
A checklist will be produced so that colleagues can check that they’ve done everything required in building their modules.
Colleagues would like a consistent message from Information Services about the project.
Training sessions will be offered to all Registry teams as well as external examiners and franchise campuses.
Communications and approach will include the benefits of the move to Ultra and a list of new features.
Where possible, video materials will be created.
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.
