AI Initiatives

The Division of Information Technology’s AI site will help the UMBC community with information on using artificial intelligence (AI), especially generative AI (GenAI), to support UMBC’s Administrative, Instructional, and Research efforts. This site has been created to help employees advance their use of GenAI. We recommend that our UMBC community begin by visiting GenAI Tools, this page will highlight what free resources are available to use and what options exist to use GenAI while safeguarding UMBC institutional data safely.

For staff providing support, we encourage people to look at Administrative AI, as a starting point. Our goal is to save folks time and improve the quality of their work, thus increasing productivity. We highlight some tools that DoIT is providing for support.

Additionally, we have launched an AI-supported search bar called myUMBC Answers.  We are seeking partners to work with DoIT to expand myUMBC Answers. The key to your office leveraging myUMBC Answers is providing validated and accurate content, such as FAQs or a handbook produced annually.

For faculty, we encourage you to also explore instructional AI and research AI. An excellent resource in the College of Engineering is the UMBC Center for AI.  You can follow news about the UMBC Center for AI on social media through its sites on LinkedIn, Bluesky, X, and Facebook. Members of the UMBC community can subscribe to the UMBC AI Group to receive email about AI-related news and events. If you have news to share with the UMBC AI community or suggestions or comments on the site, please send them to umbc-ai@cs.umbc.edu.

 

AI News

Showing items tagged blackboard. Show All

Better Tests & Grading Lead New Bb Ultra Changes

Ultra to reach 95% feature parity with Original by SP2023

After extensive updates to assessments and grading, Ultra is expected to reach 95% feature parity by the end of spring 2023, allowing faculty to migrate their Original courses into the most...

Posted: August 23, 2022, 1:43 PM

Free Webinar Series: Teaching with Ultra, Basics to Advanced

Free training opportunities for faculty, TAs, and staff

The Bb Instructor Webinar Series offers free 45-minute webinars designed for instructors who are getting started with teaching using Blackboard Ultra and Collaborate. Topics include getting...

Posted: August 8, 2022, 11:32 AM

FA2022 Courses Created in Blackboard on July 28, 2022

Blackboard course shells for FA2022 were created on July 28, 2022. The Ultra Course Preview setting is again enabled in FA2022 courses, which allows faculty to convert a new Original course to...

Posted: July 29, 2022, 8:13 AM

August Release Brings Major Question Banks Update to Ultra

New mobile app, more assessment and grading improvements

It's another massive update for Ultra in August, bringing a significant improvement to question banks, a unified mobile app experience for faculty and students, and overall enhancements to...

Posted: July 26, 2022, 4:10 PM

Points Calculation & Display Arrive to Ultra Gradebook

Prevent question backtracking, copy question banks & more

The July update to Ultra courses brings ten new features and improvements, focusing on assessment, grading, and content creation. As with previous updates this year, the continued focus aligns...

Posted: June 29, 2022, 12:44 PM