Access to UMBC Google Drive Comes to Ultra in July

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, and the Tools page. In later versions of this new integration, users will be able to create and collaborate on Google documents -- all within the context of an Ultra course.

Additionally, Collaborate moderators will be able to share files with one or more breakout groups when that service is updated later in July. Files uploaded to a Collaborate session can be renamed within the live session and files shared in breakout rooms can be transferred back into the persistent content for the main Collab session.

Course shells for FA2019 will be created at the end of July. Both Ally and the Ultra Course Preview tool will be enabled in all courses, allowing faculty to review course materials for accessibility and to explore and adopt Ultra during the phased roll-out of Ultra.

The next Blackboard Learn update will be posted to our test site around July 16th and pushed to production around August 8th. Faculty who are interested in test driving new features before they are released to production should open an RT ticket to request early access. 

As always, if you have any questions, please consider the following options:

• Check our extensive FAQ collection 

• What’s new in Ultra? | Known Issues 

• Open a ticket via RT

• Follow the Instructional Technology & DoIT myUMBC groups

• Request a consult with instructional technology staff

• Review your course content with Ally