What’s New

This fall, UMBC faculty will have the opportunity to test Blackboard’s new AI Virtual Assistant (AVA), a suite of tools designed to support common teaching tasks.  AVA Feedback Assistant will...

DoIT is pleased to announce a new form to help faculty manage their Blackboard course shells with greater efficiency. As part of our ongoing updates to the course creation and enrollment process,...

As part of a campus-wide upgrade to its video capture and media management tools, UMBC will begin transitioning from Panopto to YuJa starting this fall. The migration will run through March 25,...

This month’s Ultra update makes it easier than to generate meaningful descriptions for complex images. August also brings new tools for recording video announcements, styling course materials, and...

Blackboard course shells for Fall 2025 were created on July 16, 2025. All Fall 2025 courses listed in the UMBC Schedule of Classes (SOC), regardless of designation as lecture, lab, etc, or...

Tom Penniston, Ph.D., has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar award to advance learning-analytics projects in Croatia during the 2025–26 academic year. As UMBC DoIT’s Coordinator of Learning...

Anthology, the parent company of Blackboard, has announced that they will retire Original courses and organizations on December 31, 2026. At this point, all Original content in courses and...

How do you know if students actually read that important course announcement? What if you could make your content more accessible by adding image captions or rendering complex math more clearly...

CourseArc offers new AI-powered features to make content creation smarter and faster. From generating alt text and long descriptions to transforming outlines into full lessons and creating quizzes...

Please note that after June 30, 2025, your UMBC VoiceThread account may be accessed via:  https://voicethread.com   Currently UMBC users may access VoiceThread via: https://umbc.voicethread.com. ...