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

Publisher Integrations Updated in Blackboard for FA2019

Cengage & Wiley fully supported in Ultra courses

Several publisher integrations will be updated at the end of summer to leverage modern infrastructure functionality, which will change the way faculty access those tools. Both Cengage Mindtap...

Posted: August 6, 2019, 8:06 AM

Increased Test Randomization Available in Ultra in August

Organizations also come to Ultra next month

In the August update to Ultra courses, faculty can create question pools to help build assessments quickly and better support academic integrity. Instructors can add questions to from all existing...

Posted: July 30, 2019, 11:21 AM

FA2019 Courses Created in Blackboard on July 28, 2019

Blackboard course shells for FA2019 were created on July 28, 2019. The Ultra Course Preview setting is again enabled in FA2019 courses to allow faculty adoption during the phased roll-out of...

Posted: July 30, 2019, 11:19 AM

Access to UMBC Google Drive Comes to Ultra in July

Learn what’s coming to Ultra & Collaborate next month

This month’s update to Blackboard will provide access to UMBC’s Google Drive. Faculty, staff, and students will be able to view their Google cloud storage from their Ultra courses, user profile,...

Posted: July 3, 2019, 12:30 PM

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