Six month roadmap previewed for Ultra courses

Focus on assessment, grading, content, learner analytics

Over the last year, Ultra received more than 150 enhancements and new features to strengthen and improve the new course for faculty and students. At the first quarter roadmap for 2023, the Ultra developers presented extensive plans for the next six months, focusing on grading and assessment, engagement and collaboration, content and course organization, and learner analytics.

In March, Ultra courses will receive improvements to multiple submissions, allowing faculty to quickly shift between student attempts for grading and comparison, as well as a downloadable PDF version of the SafeAssign report. More information about the March release is available on the What's New in Ultra FAQ with a forthcoming update expected to myUMBC before the Blackboard site is updated early March.

In April, we expect to see two improvements requested by UMBC faculty and one new feature:

Multiple grading schema: Create more than one grading schema in your Ultra course including pass/fail or complete/incomplete.
Import questions into Question Banks: Abandon those messy gradebook columns from unused tests and create question banks instead!
Search course content: Quickly find course content by searching title and description. This feature will be available to students and faculty. Exclusive to Ultra courses.

These are not the only enhancements expected in April, but the most exciting to share.

Although Anthology also offered a roadmap for Original, the majority of development continues to center in usability, accessibility, security, and storage management. Most development described during the Q1 2023 Original roadmap centered on system admin tools, base navigation (e.g., the Blackboard dashboard), or global changes impacting both Ultra and Original courses such as tool integration and Bb Annotate. A few enhancements focus on usability such as streamlining the assignment submission process for students with a few improvements slated for long term development (e.g., more than six months).

The Instructional Technology team tracks and shares monthly updates to its myUMBC group and presents a What's New in Ultra for Teaching & Learning webinar every semester. Blackboard's quarterly roadmaps are open to the public.

As always, if you have any questions about teaching, learning, and technology, please consider the following options: