Blackboard course shells for FA2024 were created on May 13, 2024 per our previous announcement to support faculty preparation for Ultra in advance of the fall semester. Student enrollments, as well as course shells that were not created in May, were processed on July 31, 2024. 

Ultra will be the default in Blackboard with nearly 70 percent of all UMBC courses using Ultra since spring 2024. If COEIT or CNMS faculty wish to “roll back” their Fall 2024 Ultra shells to Original, they can do soby RT ticket for this semester only; the last day we will support Blackboard Original is December 31, 2024. DoIT strongly recommends faculty request a roll back before the first day of classes to ensure sufficient time for course preparation. Please review the conditions for requesting a roll back.

Training & Support for Ultra

• Attend an upcoming August training to prepare for the fall semester.
• Request a consult from our staff Ultra “office hours” or download our 8-step migration guide.
• Explore our Panopto folder for a wide variety of recorded webinars on various instructional technologies available at UMBC.
• Have a question about Ultra? Askan Ultra Ambassador!

Plan your accessibility and Universal Design for Learning strategy before students begin working with course materials. Ally, an accessibility tool, is enabled in all course shells. Ally automatically scans uploaded and created course content, then performs a series of steps to make that content more accessible. Please review the Ally FAQs for more information about theaccessibility indicators on course content and alternative formats, or attend a training session. Use Ally’s new AI alt-text generator to add alt text to course images. 

About Course Creation

Bb shells for FA2024 are available for all courses (designated as lecture, lab, field or discussion) listed in the UMBC Schedule of Classes (SOC), provided that there is an instructor of record listed. As new course sections and/or instructors are added to the SOC by Department Scheduling Coordinators, corresponding Bb shells are automatically generated overnight. 

• If you are an instructor, and your name is not associated with the course you are teaching in the SOC, please see your Departmental Scheduling Coordinator to resolve the issue. Once you are listed in the SOC, your Bb course shell will be created automatically. 
• If you and your Department Scheduling Coordinator believe you are correctly assigned as the instructor of record in the SOC and you do not see your course shell in Blackboard, please submit a Request Tracker (RT) ticket via my.umbc.edu/help.
• If you need a Bb shell for a research or independent study course, please submit a new course request.

Instructors who teach multiple sections of the same course will find those enrollments merged into one Bb course shell. These sections may be split upon request by an RT ticket, which we recommend submitting at least one week before the semester starts, if not as soon as courses are created in Blackboard. NOTE: Courses should not be split after student grade data and engagement activity is recorded since it will be purged as part of the separation process.

Student enrollment in Bb mirrors the official registration in SA and updates hourly. However, courses are not accessible to students by default until the instructor of record makes them available.

Connect with Instructional Technology

Katherine Carver ’26, physics and mathematics, started off her UMBC experience with a big bang—participating in the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory CIRCUIT internship as a first-year student in spring 2023. Carver says she took advantage of every opportunity she could, from on-site guest lectures and panel discussions to informally networking with APL employees down the hall.

One of the panelists particularly caught her attention, so Carver approached her afterward—and in the two-hour conversation that followed, Kathleen Hamilton-Campos, an APL researcher, encouraged Carver to apply to the Space Astronomy Summer Program at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) at Johns Hopkins University, which Hamilton-Campos had completed in 2019. Carver received notification that she’d been selected as an intern while attending a Society of Women Engineers conference this spring.

This summer at STScI, Carver, a Meyerhoff Scholar, has been digging into developing open-source software that allows astronomers anywhere to analyze data arriving from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), the most powerful space telescope ever launched. 

Mission possible with James Webb

“The whole mission objective for JWST was to see further back into the universe than ever before or possible with the Hubble Telescope or any other type of telescope,” Carver explains. “With how light travels, if you’re looking at something four billion light years away,”—which JWST can—“that means you’re looking at it as it appeared four billion years ago. Which could be very useful for scientists trying to understand how our universe has come to evolve to its current state.” Indeed, Carver continues, JWST can observe light so old that it comes from nearly the beginning of the universe, more than 13 billion years ago—billions of years before Earth even existed. 

The analysis software Carver is working on is called Jdaviz, and it’s written in python. The data files are massive and complex, Carver explains, “so for a scientist who’s interested in only a brief part of the sky, or a particular source, like a star or a galaxy, it can be hard to navigate,” she says, “especially when some of these images have thousands and thousands of sources in them.”

Carver’s contributions are making the data easier to work with, and as a result facilitating scientific discovery in a wide range of research areas. As part of the internship, she also went on a field trip to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and saw where the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope—a telescope whose capabilities will complement JWST’s observations—is being developed. 

“Be persistent”

Through her CIRCUIT and STScI internships, Carver, a rising junior, has already picked up valuable coding skills, including managing interactions between behind-the-scenes code and the user interface, debugging code with errors, navigating code sets that include hundreds of files that all need to talk to each other, and much more. 

The computer science training is likely to come in handy in her future, she says, but she doesn’t expect coding to become her bread and butter. She wants to stay on the science side, using tools like Jdaviz rather than developing them—although her time coding will make her even more grateful for the programmers who do. This fall, Carver is excited to move in that direction by conducting research with UMBC astrophysicist Adi Foord. 

Carver has some words of encouragement for students just getting started on their research journey. 

“There’s no hurt in putting your name out there, even if you feel like you will get rejected. Sometimes you might see the final polished picture, like, ‘Oh, she’s done research at APL. She’s done research at STScI. Those are really competitive’—but I also got a lot of rejections,” Carver says. “Shoot for the internships even if you feel like you won’t get them. Be persistent, ask around, talk to your professors. And then once you are there, take maximum advantage of every opportunity.”

The UMBC Ancient Studies Department will conduct its annual study tour in Turkey, March 14-23, 2025. The cost of $3,500 covers all air and land travel, twin-share accommodation for eight nights at four-star hotels, eight buffet breakfasts, two dinners, two lunches, and entrance to all archaeological sites and museums on the itinerary. A single room is available at an additional cost of $482. ANCS majors and minors, UMBC students, faculty, staff, alumni, and their friends and family are invited to join us. 

You can download a registration form from the department website (https://ancientstudies.umbc.edu). Please return this fillable form to Lydia DeRidder (lderidde@umbc.edu) by Oct.4, 2024. An initial deposit of $150 is due Oct. 4, 2024. Ancient Studies majors and minors can also download applications for travel subsidies from the department website. Please return completed subsidy forms to Dr. David Rosenbloom (dsrose@umbc.edu) by Sept. 27, 2024.

The tour begins with a two-night stay in Istanbul, followed one-night in Çanakkale (Troy), three nights in Kuşadasi, and two nights in Ankara, before returning to Istanbul for the flight home. In Istanbul, we will visit the Hippodrome of Constantine, Aghia Sophia, the Archaeological Museum, Topkapı Palace, and the Blue Mosque. Next, we travel to the archaeological site and museum of Troy en route to Kuşadası, the base of operations for trips to Ephesos, Priene, Miletos, and Didyma. We spend the last two days and nights in Ankara, visiting the magnificent Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, and three Hittite sites, the fortified capital Hattusa, the necropolis at Alaca Höyük, and the mysterious sanctuary and rock reliefs at Yazılıkaya.

Starting August 1, 2024, Google will implement changes that impact ad blocking tools in Chrome and how YouTube videos are viewed. Chrome no longer supports tools that block ads, including third-party extensions, and has developed technology to inject ads into the videos themselves to bypass ad-blocking tools.