In the August update to Ultra courses, faculty can create question pools to help build assessments quickly and better support academic integrity. Instructors can add questions to from all existing tests, assignments and question banks in their courses, and those question pools will distribute different sets of questions to students.

Additionally, Ultra courses will now support a much needed feature in assessments: Hiding answers on a test while it is in progress. Faculty will be able to check a setting to show or hide the correct answers on a test. At this time, instructors must disable the setting after all students complete the test if they want students to later see the correct answers.

Organizations and communities may now adopt Ultra after the August update. Please consult the Instructional Technology office to determine whether converting or redesigning is best for your organization.

Course shells for FA2019 were created on July 28, 2019. Both Ally and the Ultra Course Preview tool are enabled in all courses, allowing faculty to review course materials for accessibility and to explore and adopt Ultra during the phased roll-out of Ultra.

The next Blackboard Learn update will be posted to our test site around August 13th and pushed to production around September 5th. Faculty who are interested in test driving new features before they are released to production should open an RT ticket to request early access. 

As always, if you have any questions, please consider the following options:

• Check our extensive FAQ collection 

• What’s new in Ultra? | Known Issues 

• Open a ticket via RT

• Follow the Instructional Technology & DoIT myUMBC groups

  • Sign up for a webinar & other training 

• Request a consult with instructional technology staff

Review your course content with Ally

This month’s update to Blackboard will provide access to UMBC’s Google Drive. Faculty, staff, and students will be able to view their Google cloud storage from their Ultra courses, user profile, and the Tools page. In later versions of this new integration, users will be able to create and collaborate on Google documents -- all within the context of an Ultra course.

Additionally, Collaborate moderators will be able to share files with one or more breakout groups when that service is updated later in July. Files uploaded to a Collaborate session can be renamed within the live session and files shared in breakout rooms can be transferred back into the persistent content for the main Collab session.

Course shells for FA2019 will be created at the end of July. Both Ally and the Ultra Course Preview tool will be enabled in all courses, allowing faculty to review course materials for accessibility and to explore and adopt Ultra during the phased roll-out of Ultra.

The next Blackboard Learn update will be posted to our test site around July 16th and pushed to production around August 8th. Faculty who are interested in test driving new features before they are released to production should open an RT ticket to request early access. 

As always, if you have any questions, please consider the following options:

• 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

• Review your course content with Ally 

The DoIT Technology Support Center is looking to hire additional consultants to work during the Fall semester and beyond. Please see our job description below and visit our job posting on UMBCWorks to apply. (Search for TSC Student Consultant.) The application will be open until July 8th.

TSC Student Consultant Job Description

Technology Support Center (TSC) student consultants are the first points of technical contact for the UMBC community and those who do well often go on to work in other areas of the Division of Information Technology (DoIT). Minimally, consultants are expected to provide initial triage and support for a wide range of information technologies including accounts, hardware, instructional technologies, networking, software, telecommunications, and basic web development.

Responsibilities include, but are not limited to the following:

• Provide technical assistance to users by phone, online and in person;
• Answer TSC phones in a professional and courteous manner;
• Create, update and resolve tickets in the Request Tracker (RT) ticketing system;
• Create, update, suggest and recommend relevant FAQ articles to users (www.umbc.edu/faq);
• Provide direct assistance to users on technical issues they cannot easily resolve on their own;
• Complete in-person or online training about quality support as defined in umbc.edu/go/ticketrubric;
• Respond to all work-related communications in a timely manner;
• Escalate urgent problems to the Full-Time staff, as appropriate.

Required Skills and Experience

• Demonstrated ability to effectively communicate by phone or in person.
• Demonstrated writing ability.
• Demonstrated ability to achieve successful outcomes in handling difficult situations and customers.
• Demonstrated analytical and troubleshooting skills.
• Ability & willingness to learn coupled with a clear understanding of one’s technical abilities, so as to triage and escalate an issue that leads to an effective solution for the user.