AI Initiatives

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

For staff providing support, we encourage people to look at Administrative AI, as a starting point. Our goal is to save people time and hopefully improve the quality of their work, thus increasing productivity. We highlight some tools that DoIT is providing for support and we are seeking partners to work with DoIT on expanding myUMBC Answers. The real key to your office leveraging myUMBC Answers is to be able to provide 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. A wonderful resource in the College of Engineering 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 ultra-experience. Show All

Delegated Grading, Import Calendars Come to Ultra in June

Learn what’s coming to Ultra & Collaborate next month

The June update to Blackboard brings delegated grading to Ultra courses. Renamed “parallel marking” in Ultra, this feature is designed to minimize bias when paired with anonymous grading. Parallel...

Posted: May 30, 2019, 1:25 PM

Student Preview & Question Banks Come to Ultra in May

Learn what’s coming to Ultra

A core feature in an Original Blackboard course, Student Preview is used by faculty to review the content and tool functionality in a virtual environment before releasing to students -- and it is...

Posted: May 2, 2019, 10:27 AM

SU2019 Courses Created in Blackboard on April 26, 2019

Blackboard course shells for SU2019 were created on April 26, 2019. The Ultra Course Preview setting is again enabled in SU2019 courses to allow faculty adoption. The Ultra Course Preview tool...

Posted: May 2, 2019, 10:25 AM

UMBC Makes Major Investment in Instructional Technology

Phased rollout of Bb Ultra better supports campus e-Learning

Earlier this week the Provost and Deans agreed to a DoIT proposal to go forward with a broad investment in instructional technology support staff, software tools and training stipends for faculty....

Posted: April 4, 2019, 8:06 AM

Improve Accessibility of Blackboard Course Content with Ally

Build inclusive environment for all student learning styles

To support UMBC’s ongoing commitment to a more inclusive campus, DoIT is pleased to introduce a new tool called Ally into Ultra courses to help improve the accessibility of course content in...

Posted: March 13, 2019, 11:35 AM