August Release Brings Major Question Banks Update to Ultra

New mobile app, more assessment and grading improvements

It's another massive update for Ultra in August, bringing a significant improvement to question banks, a unified mobile app experience for faculty and students, and overall enhancements to assessment, grading, content, and engagement.

ASSESSMENT & GRADING

Question banks: Create, edit, and manage - Last month, Ultra added the option to copy question banks between courses. With this update, faculty can create new question banks in a course, search for questions in a bank, as well as add, edit, and delete questions within a bank.

Image 1: Example of new question banks interface
Set due date exceptions - Instructors can add due date exceptions for a student per assessment as well as existing exceptions for additional attempts or item visibility.
Submission filter improvements - Quickly sort the list of submissions on an assessment's grading page to view which students have opened or completed an activity and which submissions need to be graded.
Advanced calculation for Overall Grade - In addition to points (added in July) and weighted options for calculating the Overall Grade in your Ultra gradebook, you can also create a bespoke formula in a customized column for greater flexibility and evaluation needs.
Auto-save for student written responses - Student responses entered in the content editor will be auto-saved every 2 seconds after the student stops/pauses typing. Ultra will post a last saved date/time in the lower right corner of the page. [Update: This feature is delayed.]

CONTENT & ENGAGEMENT

Create, import/export groups and membership with CSV file - Instructors can create group sets and add members with a CSV file. You can also export your groups and memberships to reuse in another course. The update to the Ultra groups tool will replace the custom tool licensed by UMBC.

Image 2: Example of updated groups management interface
LaTex equation support - Create and edit LaTex equations using the Ultra content editor.
Send messages in private/unavailable courses - Instructors can send messages (email) to students in courses that are not yet available.
Messages automatically go out as emails - Messages will automatically go out as emails (except Announcements) to align to the Send Email tool in Original. Messages will still be retained as part of your course archive.

As with previous updates this year, the continued focus aligns with faculty feedback and requests to strengthen essentials features and settings in core Ultra tools, bringing feature parity closer to 95% by SP2022.

Finally, Blackboard consolidated the mobile app for both instructors and students rather than have separate apps. Instructors can use the updated Blackboard app for both Original and Ultra courses since the user experience will change based on the assigned role within a course. This new Blackboard mobile app will be available August 8, 2022, from the iOS and Android app stores. Students using the current Blackboard app should simply update. Instructors, assistants, and graders should remove the Blackboard Instructor app as support ends in September 2022.

Faculty should see the latest updates in Ultra courses around August 4-5, 2022. UMBC FAQs will be updated over the next few weeks before fall classes start and Blackboard help documentation is also available. Please sign up for one of our What's New in Ultra for Teaching & Learning webinars or Ultra Essentials trainings in August to learn more about these exciting new features!

The next update to our Ultra test environment will take place on August 9, 2022. Faculty who are interested in test driving new features before they are released to production should open an RT ticket to request early access. Additionally, our Ultra feature tracker is updated and now includes a filter for functional category (e.g., assessment, course management, grading) so you can sort only those items you might be interested in tracking the status. Please watch the FAQs, including the What's New with Ultra page, and myUMBC for additional information about Ultra.

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