Robust assessment settings are necessary to support a range of different scenarios. Assessment settings are also important for academic integrity and honesty in courses. Ultra courses currently accept and mark submissions as "late" if received after the due date. A new setting in Ultra tests and assignments will give faculty more control over due dates and time limits, enforcing a hard deadline to disallow late submissions, or preventing students from beginning new attempts at an assessment after a due date.
Figure 1: Set new limits on late submissions for Ultra assignments.
Migrating to Ultra will be easier with an updated course copy tool available in February, allowing faculty to easily pull content from older Original courses directly into their Ultra course shells. This enhancement to course copy provides increased efficiency and greater flexibility for reusing content, saving This will save time and reduce frustration when building a course. Faculty may choose to copy all or select content from Original courses as they currently do from Ultra courses. Supported content types include folders, documents, tests, assignments, website links, discussions, and journals. Group assignments are also included.
Finally, a new user-specified setting allows faculty, staff, and students to add text guidance for the pronunciation of their names and/or an audio recording of their names to their profiles. The recording tool may be up to 20 seconds long. Please review the FAQ to learn how to update your pronunciation and determine where the pronunciation appears in Ultra courses. This feature is not yet supported in Original courses, but is expected at a later date.
The next update to our test environment will take place on February 8, 2021. Faculty who are interested in test driving new features before they are released to production should open an RT ticket to request early access. Please watch the FAQs 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: