Turnitin will be unavailable between 16:00 and 22:00 on Saturday 7 February 2026 for scheduled maintenance.
During this time, you will be unable to submit or grade any assessments.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
Now that semester 1 teaching has finished and we are moving towards the assessment period, we wanted to write a blogpost to highlight the analytical reports that are available in Blackboard.
These reports can be used to monitor Blackboard usage and engagement and help you to re-enforce messages to students.
By default, the student progress summary is enabled on all content items in Blackboard courses.
This allows Blackboard to record when content has been opened, and students are able to mark tasks as complete.
To access the report, click on the … to the right of the content item and select Student Progress:
There you’ll see the progress report:
From this page, you can also filter students by those who have unopened the content, those who have started it, and those who have marked it as complete.
If you apply a filter, you can message the highlighted students using the message button.
Using Blackboard tests? You can run a report to analyse the questions with:
In addition to this, it also allows you to re-examine questions with the Discrimination report. This indicates how well questions differentiate between students across all levels.
The difficulty report indicates which questions are easy, medium and hard.
To view the report (once the test has ended), navigate to the test and select Question Analysis:
The report will run and you will receive an email once it has completed:
Making use of Discussions in your Blackboard course? Then you can run a report for the overview which will give you the total number of active students, the average number of posts per students, as well as the average wordcount for blogposts.
You can click on Student Activity for the overview:
You can use the message feature to contact students who haven’t engaged, as well as see the top participants, and the responses with the most replies.
The Course Analytics page allows you to flag alert settings for students based on the amount of time spent in the course and the dates since their last access.
Choose Analytics from the top menu:
You have two views:
For further information on using the Analytics feature, see Blackboard Help: https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Ultra/Performance/Course_Reports/Course_Activity_Related_to_Grades
If you are interested in looking in more detail at course analytics, we are holding an online training session on Monday 9 February between 15:10-16:00. You can book your place online via the training booking page.
Happy New Year!
Just before the Christmas vacation period, we hosted our final event of the year: a mini conference on Generative AI.
The materials from this Mini Conference are now available on our webpages.
Thank you very much to our presenters from the Departments of Computer Science, Geography and Earth Sciences, and the School of Literature and Languages.
And a special thank you to our external speakers: James Fern and Richard Mason from Bath University who gave us a brilliant overview of the two-lane approach to assessment design that Bath is currently working through.
We look forward to welcoming you to one of our upcoming events.
We’ve had some fantastic experiences and milestones this year.
Back in March, we announced our 2025 Exemplary Course Award and highly commended recipients.
In April, we hosted a Mini Conference on Employability and the Inclusive Curriculum in collaboration with colleagues in Careers and Employability.
In July, we had our 13th Annual Education and Student Experience Conference with over 200 attendees across 3 days.
At this event, a new Education and Student Experience Award Fund was announced, and we confirmed the recipients of these in November.
In November, we took part in Blackboard Ally Fix your Content Day, making the content of our Virtual Learning Environment even more accessible. We placed 3rd in the UK and 60th on the international leaderboard.
From a technical perspective, we’re really pleased with the introduction of automatic captions on lecture recordings, Blackboard’s Learning Object Repository, badges and achievements, and the e-submission review.
And we’re rounding the year off with a Mini Conference on Generative AI on Thursday 18 December. We’ve got a fantastic programme and there is still time to book your place.
We’re excited about what 2026 will bring in the Digital Education arena.
Some initial things that we’ll be working on and want to draw your attention to.
Applications for the Exemplary Course Award 2026 will close on Friday 30 January.
On January 8 there will be a minor update to the Blackboard interface.
We’re planning our next Mini Conference in collaboration with colleagues in Student Journey for April 2026. Further information will be made available soon.
And our 14th Education and Student Experience Conference will take place between 8-10 September 2026. Keep an eye out for updates, call for proposals, and external speaker announcements.
We’ve got our training programme available on the booking system for Semester 2 for colleagues to book onto.
We’re looking forward to working further with you in 2026.
We hope you have a restful break.
Kate, Keziah, & Jim
In the December update, we want to draw your attention to the following Blackboard enhancements:
Instructors now have greater flexibility when managing student participation in graded Discussions.
With this update, instructors can specify required student responses for a Discussion topic.
Instructors can now make clear participation requirements to students. The initial release adds participation requirements to the existing due date(s) for discussions. Instructors can set requirements on the number of required posts and/or replies for a student to fulfil the requirement.
The status of participation requirements is updated through to completion, giving a student a clear understanding of progress made. Participation requirements are linked to progress tracking, so that will be accurately displayed for the student to monitor.
This update does not affect grading workflows or Gradebook structure.
Image 1: Instructors being able to set participation requirements in discussion settings.
The new participation requirements in Discussions give students a clearer understanding of instructor expectations in an assigned Discussions topic. Students can monitor their progress both in the assigned Discussions topic as well as in Progress Tracking.
Image 2: Showing the complete state when all the requirements have been met.
MathJax support in the Content Editor now includes additional LaTeX delimiters for rendering mathematical formulas. This update improves compatibility with standard STEM workflows and simplifies uploading exam content without changing source files.
Instructors and students can now use:
These options are in addition to the existing $ delimiters. Expanded support improves the experience of working with mathematical notation in Ultra courses and enhances visual clarity for complex expressions such as integrals, sums, and products.
Instructors now have access to a collapsible Table of Contents panel in Learning Modules. This update mirrors the student experience and supports consistent navigation across roles.
The Table of Contents panel includes all items in a learning module. Select Contents to open or collapse the panel. Instructors can navigate the full module structure and align course design with the student experience.
Image 1: Instructor view of a Learning Module with the Table of Contents panel open.
For smaller screen sizes, when an instructor sets up an assignment within a learning module, the settings panel moves from the right-hand side into the header bar. This is signified by a settings cog.
The change has been made to allow more space on the screen with the left-handed table of contents available. Users accessing that board on smaller screens, you will notice that the settings cog has moved to the header bar for that particular piece of assessment.
We expanded release conditions to include activity on items including non-assessment content. This enhancement allows conditions to be based on whether a student has opened or started content items such as documents, media, or course links. Instructors can now control access based on whether a student has opened or started a prerequisite content item.
Key options for release conditions:
For example, an instructor can require students to open a reading or watch a video before an assessment becomes available.
We’ve enhanced Flexible Grading and the Submissions page for group assessments to better handle changes in group memberships. These improvements ensure grading accuracy and reduce confusion when groups are modified after submissions:
Image 1: On the Submissions page, a No Members label appears in groups with no members.
Image 2: The Flexible Grading interface shows the current group members for each attempt.
Back in October we launched automations – an automated messaging tool to contact students based on marks in the gradebook.
Several enhancements have been made to automations in this month’s updated:
Instructors
Image 1: There is an indicator of the status of each automation in the list (active or inactive). The last person to execute the action is stated under each automation, and an error message is displayed for an automation that is incorrectly configured.
If you have any enhancements to request from Blackboard, please get in touch with us via elearning@aber.ac.uk.
On Thursday 8 January, there will be a minor update to the Blackboard interface.
There is no downtime associated with this update, and Blackboard will continue to function normally during this period.
These changes include:
In addition to this, to maximise screen space, Blackboard will remove the nested folder view.
If you have any issues, please contact the Digital Education Team on elearning@aber.ac.uk.
We are delighted to confirm our programme for our final event of the year on Thursday 18 December.
Our Mini Conference on Generative AI is taking place between 09:30 and 15:30. We are running this as a hybrid event. For those wanting to join in person, it will take place in the Visualisation Centre building, VC, 0.06.
We are delighted to confirm our external speakers:
James Fern and Richard Mason will be joining us to share the 2-lane approach to Generative AI Assessment Design that has been adopted at Bath University.
You can read more about this on their webpages: The Two-Lane Approach to GenAI Assessment Categorisation – Learning and Teaching Hub
In addition to James and Richard, we have an exciting line up:
To see the full programme and abstracts, see our webpage. You can book your place clicking on this link.
A huge thank you to all the staff who we’re involved in Fix Your Content Day on 18th and 19th November. This was the first time that AU signed up to the Day, and we’re pleased to announce that we placed 60th in the official leader board.
120 institutions took part from across the world. There were 13 institutions from the UK and Aberystwyth placed 3rd in the UK.
AU staff made 125 changes to content through Blackboard Ally in the 24 hours of the competition. During our drop-in afternoon, we were able to provide guidance on headings and styles, font colours and contrast, as well as handwritten documents and PDFs. Each of those 125 changes make it easier for students to engage with their learning materials.
We’re also pleased to announce that the overall Ally score for 2025-26 courses on 19th November was 74.9% – an increase of 5.3% from the previous year.
The good news is that you don’t have to wait until the next Fix Your Content Day to use Ally. You can use Ally any time you like – it’s quick and easy to use for both existing and new content.
A big thanks to all staff who have taken the time to check on the accessibility of their course materials and made changes to them.
On November 18, Aberystwyth University will join institutions worldwide for Fix Your Content Day 2025, hosted by Anthology. If you are wondering about what this means, or whether to take part, then here are a few reasons to get involved.
Every change – big or small – makes a difference to our students. Making Blackboard content as accessible as possible benefits all our students. Having materials in a format that students can use easily means that they can focus on their learning rather than struggling with inaccessible formats. The choices that staff make to design accessible materials, as well as the Ally Alternative Format tools, help us to make sure that all students can engage with their studies.
It’s particularly important here at AU, as the latest HERA data show that over 28% of our students have a declared disability (compared to 16.7% nationally).
Drop-in session open to all. Although our e-learning staff are always willing to help you with accessibility, we’ll have dedicated support available in B23 Llandinam during the afternoon of 18th. Come along and we can show you how to use Ally or discuss any particular issues you have with your course materials. And tea and biscuits will be available!
And finally, taking part in Fix Your Content Day is part of our ongoing commitment to ensuring that all students can engage with learning materials.
As leader of our PGCTHE programme, I keep an eye out for resources to help staff teach effectively. These include webinars, podcasts, online toolkits, publications and more. Topics include active learning, online/blended teaching, accessibility/inclusion, and effective learning design based on cognitive science. Below I’ve listed items that came to my attention in the past week. In the interest of clarity, our policy is to show the titles and descriptions in the language of delivery.
Please see the Staff Training booking page for training offered by the LTEU and other Aberystwyth University staff. I hope you find this weekly resource roundup useful. If you have questions or suggestions, please contact our team at lteu@aber.ac.uk. Social Media: BSky, X.com.