Summer brings four enhancements to Ultra course including three focused on assessment and grading.
- Enhancement to Overall Grade Weighting: Instructors can weigh individual items (e.g., tests, assignments) separately from their categories. This includes discussions, which previously remained locked into their categories.
- Set Running Total: Toggle a new setting in the Overall Grade column to let students know if the final grade displayed is a running total.
- Create Multiple Attempts for Group Assessments: Allow more than one attempt for group assignments. Previously, you could only set multiple attempts for individual assignments, not for groups.
Robust content creation is important for effective course design, including how that content is displayed to students. Currently, when file attachments are added to Ultra Documents and Assessments, students must download the files to view the content. With the June update, instructors can set the behavior for file attachment:
- view and download: Students can view the file within Ultra AND download it to their own devices
- view only: Students can ONLY view the file on screen
- download only: Students can ONLY download the file
Image 1: Example of inline file rendering in Ultra document
For courses that are in progress this summer, this feature will be automatically enabled to "view/download" when it goes into production (scheduled for June 2-3). Settings chooses when uploading new content will only copy over to another course. Please review the related FAQ for additional information.
Additionally, the Ultra developers listened to your feedback about the "Choose at least one correct answer" clause when creating multiple choice questions -- this text was visible to instructors during question creation, question editing, and grading, but it was not not visible to students. They've taken that text out to avoid confusion.
Finally, as with Original courses, the maximum file upload is limited to 75 MB per individual file, which is generally sufficient for most individual PowerPoint and PDF files. Also, since media tends to be quite large and Blackboard is not a streaming service, audio and videos should always be uploaded to Panopto for encoding and distribution to students.
The next update to our test environment will take place on June 21, 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:
