Exploring Blackboard Learn Ultra: A Feature-Rich Learning Experience

Blackboard Learn Ultra represents a significant evolution in learning management systems (LMS), offering a modern, cloud-based tool designed to enhance the teaching and learning experience. With its focus on simplified workflows, accessibility, and flexible features, Ultra aims to empower educators and engage students in a connected classroom environment.

Continuous Innovation: Monthly Feature Releases

A key characteristic of the Blackboard Ultra Experience is its rapid development cycle, with new features and updates released every month. This commitment to continuous improvement ensures that the platform remains current and responsive to the evolving needs of educators and students.

Enhanced Integration: Blackboard and Microsoft OneDrive

Blackboard and Microsoft are collaborating to create seamless integration between Blackboard and OneDrive. This feature enables instructors to link files stored in their Microsoft OneDrive accounts directly within their Blackboard courses. These links can be added to the Course Content list, Learning Modules, and Folders. Instructors can modify the files within OneDrive or Blackboard, and students will automatically see the updated versions. This integration streamlines content management and ensures students always have access to the latest materials.

AI-Powered Assistance: The AI Design Assistant

The AI Design Assistant is a powerful tool that leverages artificial intelligence to help instructors create engaging and effective course content. It now features a Context Picker when generating modules, test questions, or prompts for Assignments, Discussions, and Journals. In the past, you would have to choose which setting you wanted to use. This feature uses information from the course and a description field to provide direction to the AI when generating content. Instructors can review and choose whether to use the generated questions. NIU is piloting the AI Design Assistant for the Spring 2024 semester.

Streamlined Assessment: Flexible Grading and Feedback

Blackboard Ultra offers several features designed to make grading easier and more efficient. Instructors can now add private grading notes to student grades to remind themselves of exceptions, extensions, or reasons for grade modifications. These notes are visible to anyone with grading privileges.

Read also: Learn about Blackboard Learn at UD

To ensure students are aware of new grades, Blackboard has added an indicator to the Gradebook tab. Items with new or updated grades appear at the top of the student gradebook with a purple indicator, which disappears when the student selects the item or reviews their submission. Blackboard also marks late assessments with a "(Late)" label to reduce stress associated with the color red.

Contextual Feedback with Audio and Video

When grading by student or question, instructors can now provide contextual feedback as recorded audio and video. Detailed feedback on assessments is critical for students to understand their progress and achievement. Click the conversation bubble next to the grade pill to open the question feedback editor. In this first release, you can provide question-level feedback when grading by student (i.e., when you can see all of one student's responses at a time). After scores are posted, students can access their feedback in the Gradebook. For administrators: This feature is available for all Learn Ultra courses.

Grading Attempts

When allowing multiple attempts for an assessment, instructors can now specify which attempt they want to grade separately from how the grade for the assessment will be calculated. All attempts are always available for the instructor to view and grade.

Anonymous Grading

Flexible Grading now supports anonymous grading in Question View. Student names, avatars, and IDs are replaced with anonymous identifiers while grading. All actions available in non‑anonymous Question View remain available in anonymous mode.The ability to delegate grading responsibility based on group membership was introduced in October, 2023. This update adds the ability for you to use delegated grading with the setting to hide student names for anonymous grading.

Feedback for Overridden Grades

Feedback is crucial for students as it supports and shapes their learning journey. Now, you can give feedback for overridden tests, assignment grades, and automatic zeros. You can also add feedback when working offline with the Gradebook.

Improved Navigation and Course Management

The Courses and Organizations tabs have been redesigned with a search field and clear filters for terms and other traits. Filters can be set, term choices made, and text searches added. Selections and filters are remembered automatically, even after logging out or switching devices. The Current Courses filter is selected by default.

Batch Edit allows bulk actions to adjust course dates, such as moving them forward based on the course start date or adjusting them by a specified number of days. This update makes it easier to adjust individual dates by showing all dates on a single page. The Batch Edit page is used for taking bulk actions on content in your course, such as rolling dates forward based on the start of the semester or making several items visible or hidden. This new update allows you to change several dates in your course at once to a specific date and/or time.

Course Copy

While a full course copy is possible to migrate your content from Bb Learn Original to Bb Learn Ultra, it is highly likely to create more of a mess to clean up than it is worth. Blackboard Learn Ultra's "granular course copy" ability to bring over your course content in pieces, as you organize your new Blackboard Learn Ultra course.

Enhanced Communication and Collaboration

Posting an Announcement is now a one-step process. Announcements can be marked as read from the pop-up notification that displays when accessing a course.

Anonymous Discussions

In some Discussions, students need to feel free to express their ideas and opinions without fear of judgment. The new Anonymous Posts feature can support this by allowing students to post comments or questions to a Discussion without disclosing their identity. Instructors control whether anonymous posts are permitted on a per-discussion basis.

Enhanced threading experience in Course Messages

Course Messages now automatically organizes new messages into existing conversations, or creates a new one when needed. This streamlines communication and reduces fragmented threads. We’ve removed reply-blocking to accommodate this feature. Additionally, displaying of the Rich Text Editor and Send button now persist on mobile and hand-held devices to improve usability across devices.

Assessment and Evaluation: Tools for Effective Grading

Printing Tests and Saving Student Responses

One of the most requested features in Blackboard is the ability to print a Test for students to take offline or to save student responses as a PDF for assessment and accreditation reporting. This update adds a Print button in the upper right of a test or form for those with the instructor or teaching assistant roles. Students cannot print tests. In the initial release, you can only print blank tests where all of the questions have been added directly to the test. You cannot print tests that use question pools, print an answer key, or print student submissions to tests. Printing for Tests was initially released in June. This update adds the ability for those with the instructor and teaching assistant role to choose whether they want to print a blank test with the questions only or with both questions and answers. This update also improves the printing feature to prevent questions from breaking across pages.

Flexible Grading

Flexible grading continues to improve to make grading easier and more efficient. This update also eliminates the second grade pill for the final grade to reduce confusion.

Attempt Log

Understanding the context of student submissions is helpful when grading or responding to student issues on assignments and tests. Now the Attempt Log indicates whether a submission is manual or automatic.

Duplicate Questions

Building questions is time consuming, so any way to streamline the process is valuable! This update allows you to duplicate an existing question to create a similar question more quickly.

Forms

Forms provide a way to collect information and feedback from students via a series of questions. To create a more intuitive navigation, this update changes the grid and list view buttons to clearer text links. The new Form tool allows you to collect information from students. Similar to a survey, a Form consists of one or multiple questions that do not have correct/incorrect answers. You can enable grading for a form to encourage participation. You can view Form submissions by student or by question in the same grading view that you use for Assignments and Tests. Forms are the spiritual successor to Surveys from Original Course View. This is the first release of the feature and more capabilities are planned. For example, at this time, Forms cannot be submitted or collected anonymously. With the release of Forms for the Ultra Course View, you will also be able to use Likert questions to collect quantitative measures of opinions and attitudes. When creating a Likert question, you can select a range of 3, 5, or 7 response choices.

Metadata analysis layer in Originality Report

SafeAssign now includes a new metadata analysis layer within the Originality Report. In addition to traditional text matching, instructors can access contextual insights in the new Document Properties section in the report summary.

Question Title field relocated

The Question Title field now appears only when the metadata option is enabled. This update reduces accidental use of the title field when instructors only intend to enter question text. The workflow remains consistent with other optional metadata fields.

Generate Knowledge Checks with AI

Instructors can now generate multiple choice Knowledge Checks in Documents using AI. Questions are created based on document content and selected course items, and instructors can choose and edit the generated options. Existing manual Knowledge Check workflows remain unchanged.

Partial credit limits removed for Multiple Choice and Multiple Answer

Partial credit values for answer options no longer need to total 100%. Instructors can assign values freely within the allowed range, and the system continues to provide warnings without blocking setup. Existing behaviors for negative marking and regrading remain supported.

Add a second participation requirement and due date in Discussions

Instructors can now set two separate due dates with distinct participation requirements for Discussions, offering clearer expectations and more structured engagement. Students benefit from transparent progress tracking and updated indicators as they complete requirements across both due dates.

Accessibility and User Experience Improvements

The Blackboard Ultra Experience has animated elements such as panels that slide open and closed. Users can use their device's reduced motion setting to control whether some panel animations appear.

To support multi-language use cases, the AI Design Assistant now includes a language selector. Instructors may use the language selector to set the desired language for generated content.

Enhanced achievement usability

The Achievements tab displays a count of unread badges for students, and the “New” pill appears consistently. Instructors and students benefit from clearer wording in dialogs and improved distinction between Course Badges and Open Badges. Accessibility updates include better aria-labels, alt-text, and image styling.

Improved accessibility for custom badge options

Accessibility enhancements include clearer aria-labels, consistent alt-text, and tooltips for buttons. Decorative images are marked correctly, and fallback alt-text is provided for custom images, making badge workflows more inclusive and easier to navigate.

Gradebook Accessibility

The gradebook is now navigable using the arrow and Enter keys on the keyboard.

Observer Role

Observers have a defined population of students they can monitor. Observers can view when the student last accessed the course, details on a student’s earned grades, and a student's progression in the course. Observers can access a dedicated dashboard in the Tools area of the Base Navigation. At this time, Observers need to have a secondary account that is dedicated to observing students.

Improved Gradebook Functionality

Blackboard continues to focus on improving the usability of the Gradebook. To provide greater efficiency and clarity in the Gradebook List View, this update adds a new Category column. This column, along with the grading item icon, helps you more readily identify to which category the item belongs.

Calculation Item

The Calculation item in the Gradebook lets you create custom formulas for calculating student grades. You can add a Total calculation from either the Grid View or the List View by clicking the plus icon above, below, or between any existing graded items.

Download Function

The download function in the Gradebook allows you to download grades to a spreadsheet to analyze in other applications, such as Microsoft Excel, or to use as an offline record for archival purposes.

Visibility of Grades

Visibility of grades and feedback has been a confusing issue for most faculty and students. A recent update made the grade visible regardless of the availability dates set in the Release Conditions.

Category Column

To provide greater efficiency and clarity in the Gradebook List View, this update adds a new Category column. This column, along with the grading item icon, helps you more readily identify to which category the item belongs.

Release Conditions

Release conditions determine when students can view course content. You can specify individual students or groups, set dates to restrict access, and specify what performance or grade is necessary on another assessment to access the item. This update allows you to create multiple criteria that specifies different conditions. When release conditions are set, such as visibility dates and times, students cannot access the material until those conditions are met. However, this has the unintended consequence of also hiding assessments from them on the Gradebook tab. Now, release conditions that affect the visibility of an assessment do not affect the visibility of the grade item on the Gradebook tab. Instructors can now set more than one performance criteria per content item.

Due Dates

Due dates are important for helping students stay on track with their learning; in Blackboard, they also provide the foundation for feedback visibility, controlling access to an Assignment or Test, key notifications/reports, and (if enabled) for automatic zeroes. Previously, you have been able to remove the due date by deleting the date from the Due Date field. When you create a new graded assessment, the due date field is pre-populated with a default date and time. Previously, this time would default to 12:00 AM, which is ambiguous. It is unclear whether 12:00 AM refers to the start or end of the date selected as the due date. To simplify this setting, the time will now default to 11:59 PM on the due date selected. This can be changed to the time of your choosing.

Self-Enrollment Groups

When setting up self-enrollment groups, you must specify the maximum number of members per group. Previously, this value could not be lower than 2. This update allows you to specify a maximum size of 1, so only a single student can sign up for each group.

File Management

Every course at NIU has a 2 GB quota for file storage. When you reach that quota, Blackboard will inform you that you cannot add additional content. When you launch the Unused Files tool from the ellipsis menu (…) at the top of your course, you will have two views available: unused files or all files. The file name, upload date, and file size display along with an option to download a copy of the file.

Video Studio Enhancements

Video Studio: Generate thumbnail automatically

Video Studio now auto‑generates a thumbnail image from each new recording, giving viewers a clear visual preview and helping instructors and students quickly recognize video content before opening it. This enhancement creates a more polished viewing experience while reducing effort for instructors since thumbnails are created automatically.

Video Studio: Enhance timer to show time left during recording

Video Studio now displays the remaining recording time in both full and minimized views, giving instructors and students clearer pacing to reduce the risk of unexpected cut‑offs during recording. This improvement improves time management so users can stay focused on creating their content.

Students can download videos they create for offline use

Students can now download the Video Studio recordings they create in areas such as Discussions or Assignment submissions to their local devices for offline storage and viewing.

Administrator Features

Support subject creation

Blackboard now supports importing Subjects through SIS integrations. This update keeps Subject data aligned with institutional systems and reduces manual setup. Flat file, API‑based, and LIS workflows are supported.

Course Catalog: Batch edit offering availability

Managers can now batch edit offering availability on the Offering Management screen instead of updating each offering individually. This feature saves time by allowing managers to update multiple offerings at once.

Grade Export: Launch Grade Approval and Transfer Tool directly to column level

Administrators can set the Grade Approval and Transfer Tool to pen at the column level, bypassing the course level. This setting prevents instructors from approving an entire course’s grades without viewing the grades at the column or grade level.

Opt out of upcoming features

Administrators can now opt in or opt out of specific product functionalities directly from the Admin Panel both before and after an official release. This update gives administrators greater control over when new capabilities are enabled, so teams can adopt features on their own timelines and with more confidence.

Institutional Hierarchy: Restrict Content Copy Search for Node Administrators

Search results for courses are now limited to courses within a node administrator's scope within Institutional Hierarchy, improving governance, privacy, and institutional boundaries.

Organize terms with parent-child relationships

Institutions can create a parent Annual term with child terms such as Semester, Trimester, or Quarter.

Visualize LTI data in Anthology Adopt

Institutions can now track and segment LTI tool usage within Pendo, enabling richer insights and targeted user experiences. Pendo can identify individual LTI launches, which allows administrators to monitor adoption, analyze usage patterns, and deliver contextual guidance.

tags: #blackboard #learn #ultra #features