When Ultra was first introduced at UMBC in SP2018, four adventurous faculty opted to use a newly redesigned Blackboard course interface in their courses. Ultra represented a new phase of Blackboard’s development, focusing on student success, responsive design, mobile friendliness, and embedded analytics. Nearly three years later, more than 300 faculty now use Ultra at UMBC across more than 1200 courses throughout the pandemic. Both students and faculty alike praise Ultra’s interface and usability.

Our Ultra adoption is around 40% of the total active Blackboard courses, with most faculty adoption occurring before the pandemic and a substantial surge occurring during the pandemic. A recent plateau in adoption suggested there might be some challenges we needed to confront with Ultra’s progress and discussions to consider. Before we can get to that point, we need to reflect on the last year of teaching online and a longer time of teaching with Ultra.

12 Months of Ultra Updates

Every month, our Blackboard site gets the latest updates, thanks to our cloud hosting. Given the broad scope that Ultra presents to courses, these updates may seem slower when released on a monthly cadence. However, the list of features and enhancements is quite substantial. Key highlights include conditional release of content by groups, new text formatting options including HTML blocks, batch enrolling students into groups, qualitative peer assessments, passcode protecting tests and test feedback/grade release, and 25 videos per page in Collaborate. With the May release, faculty can set up a drop grades rule in the Ultra gradebook.

Prioritizing What’s Needed for Ultra

Now that we know what's been added to Ultra, let's look at what we're still looking to enhance. In FA2019, we gathered 75+ of the requested features and functionality for Ultra and shared this critical information with Blackboard. In SP2021, we sent a survey to all faculty teaching Ultra to prioritize the key features by functional area. The Ultra prioritization survey helped us understand UMBC’s faculty priorities and gave Bb’s developers a strong framework for how our faculty used Ultra for teaching.

Figure 1: Summarizing Ultra tool needs: Shifting priorities between SP/FA2019 and SP2021. We looked at faculty feedback on Ultra from SP2019/FA2019 and FA2020 to compare priorities, noting that key functional areas have shifted. Whereas faculty once placed group management as a major concern in Ultra’s early development, grading and assessment are now at the top of the list.

Figure 2: Ultra Feature Tracker. Currently Ultra aligns with about 76% of Original’s features, including those in research and development.

Transparency with the UMBC community is an essential part of the Ultra adoption process. Collecting feedback every semester, including the upcoming surveys for both faculty and students, is an essential part of our ongoing evaluation and project tracking. Please follow this myUMBC group for continued updates about Ultra.

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

• PIVOT | Academic Continuity | Keep On Teaching | Student Technology Resources 

• 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

By: Mariann Hawken