What’s New in EIS

As announced in June 2025, Blackboard will retire Original courses and organizations on December 31, 2026. Starting January 1, 2027, all Original content in courses and organizations will be...

It’s week eight, and a student emails asking to move to a new project team. Every student in your 30-person group set is already assigned, so finding her means opening group after group until her...

Down the hall, a colleague teaching another section of the same course asks to borrow the rubric you spent a weekend refining. How do you easily share this rubric in a Blackboard format? Later in...

A student submits their essay as a Pages file. Another turns in a .zip when you asked for a single PDF. By the time you notice, you're chasing down a resubmission instead of grading. September's...

The week before the semester starts can feel like a sprint: A full inbox, a syllabus that still needs one more edit, and a course shell that isn’t quite ready for students yet. Before the scramble...

Blackboard's August update is one of the bigger releases we've seen in a while, touching grading, navigation, assessments, and course workflows all at once. Here's what's changing, organized by...

After a year-long redesign with faculty feedback sessions – including on-site at UMBC – Blackboard will launch a new gradebook starting August 7, 2026. The redesigned gradebook grid view will...

This month's Ultra update provides a new report that gives instructors class-wide rubric data at a glance, and a dedicated field that separates discussion context from prompt. Paired with clearer...

What if a wrong answer could teach just as much as a right one? This month’s Blackboard update brings tools that let instructors do exactly that: Guiding students not just to the correct response,...

Have you ever spent more time wrestling with Blackboard's Groups tool than actually designing the group work itself, especially in a large course? The May Ultra update delivers meaningful...