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

New Update to Respondus Lockdown Browser Released

Students using Macs & Chromebooks must install update

A new update to Respondus Lockdown Browser (RLDB) is available for students to download and install. This update is for Mac users and the Chrome extension.  Students must make sure they are using...

Posted: April 22, 2021, 8:28 AM

Finalize Ultra gradebooks with new drop grades function

Much needed feature finally arrives to Ultra courses in May

An easier way to drop multiple grades from a category in the final grade calculation has been a frequent request from Ultra faculty for the Ultra course gradebook. With the May release, just in...

Posted: April 21, 2021, 10:12 AM

Group content release, peer assessment coming to Ultra

Frequently requested features available in April

In early April, a frequently requested feature finally comes to Ultra courses. Conditional release of content to groups or individual students allows faculty to create remedial paths to certain...

Posted: March 29, 2021, 10:57 AM

Reminder: Blackboard Downtime on March 14, 2021

Bb will be unavailable for 14 hours

Blackboard engineers will perform a system upgrade and maintenance on Sunday, March 14, 2021, from 9:00 AM ET to 11:00 PM ET. Blackboard will be offline during this period. Read more at our Bb...

Posted: March 14, 2021, 8:23 AM

Essential Update to Respondus Lockdown Browser Available

A new update to Respondus Lockdown Browser (RLDB) is available for students to download and install. Outdated versions of Respondus Lockdown Browser may not allow students to save short answer and...

Posted: March 9, 2021, 4:06 PM