News

After many years of use, UMBC’s license for Class Collaborate (formerly Blackboard Collaborate) will end on July 31, 2025. As one of our longest licensed tools, Collaborate provided synchronous...

Synchronous engagement tools provide platforms for instructors and students to meet during online, hybrid, and hyflex class sessions. Many courses record these live sessions to provide a lecture...

Creating captioning for recordings from scratch can be very time consuming for instructors or accessibility staff. Beginning in May 2022, instructors can leverage the help of artificial...

Interested in attending an Instructional Technology Essentials session but unsure when it will be? Sign up for one of our sessions by May 20, 2022. Interested participants will be sent a Doodle...

While teaching a synchronous session using web conferencing tools, instructors juggle content, conversation, and context. Engaging participants and maintaining a high level of interaction is an...

Breakout groups are a powerful engagement tool for active learning in a synchronous session, providing private audio, video, whiteboard, application sharing, and chat for small group...

A whiteboard is an important pedagogical tool to support handwritten expression and annotation, especially in a virtual classroom. Over the last year, Blackboard has been redesigning the...

Update @ 10/1: The pilot has concluded. In partnership with Blackboard, UMBC will pilot a recording transcription feature in the Collaborate web conferencing platform this summer. This feature...

UPDATE: Following the introduction of gallery view to faculty in April 2021, we are pleased to announce that students and participants will also have access to 25 videos per page with the May...

The end of semester is a busy time of year for everyone, especially faculty. Instructional Technology will host two 2-hour sprint sessions on Thursday, May 13, 2021 for faculty to virtually...