FACULTY: Blackboard Ultra March Madness - Feature Playbook

Blackboard Ultra March Madness - Feature Playbook with Links

Introduction:

Welcome to the Blackboard Ultra March Madness feature deep dive! This article provides detailed descriptions of the 16 innovations and enhancements included in our competition. We encourage you to explore these features to enhance your teaching and learning experience in Blackboard Ultra.

AI Improvements:

  1. AI Design Assistant: Enhanced Image Tools:  

    • Description: This feature allows faculty to create and insert visually appealing images directly into their course materials. The AI aims to generate relevant images, saving time and effort. It also integrates with documents to ensure seamless image placement, and allows for user editing.
    • Benefit: Enhances visual appeal, improves content clarity, and saves time on image creation and integration, with the understanding that some refinement may be necessary. Provides a starting point for image creation.

  2. AI Design Assistant: Rubric Generation Improvements:

    • Description: This upgrade to the AI Design Assistant enables faculty to generate suggested, well defined rubrics for their assessments. The AI assists in creating comprehensive rubrics that align with learning objectives and assessment criteria, with potential for variation, allowing for faculty customization.
    • Benefit: Streamlines rubric creation, aids in ensuring alignment with learning goals, and provides clear assessment guidelines for students.

  3. Enhanced AI Conversation Tools:

    • Description: This feature allows faculty to create engaging AI-driven learning experiences, including role-playing scenarios and Socratic reasoning dialogues. The simple setup process empowers educators to design interactive activities that foster critical thinking and practical skill development.
    • Benefit:  Enhances student engagement through interactive role play and Socratic dialogue, facilitates practice of real-world skills and critical thinking, and provides personalized AI feedback, as a supplementary tool, to guide student learning.

  4. AI-Assisted Discussion Generation: 

    • Description: Faculty can utilize the AI Design Assistant to generate suggested discussion topics and prompts based on course titles, descriptions, and selected course content. This feature provides options to customize cognitive levels, complexity, and language, providing a base for faculty review.
    • Benefit: Saves time on discussion creation, generates discussion prompts designed to stimulate critical thinking and active participation, and facilitates potential student interaction.

Enhanced Gradebook Features:

  1. Gradebook: Column Visibility (Item Management):

    • Description: This feature allows faculty to customize their Gradebook view to focus on relevant columns such as assignment grades, attendance, or calculated totals. Faculty can easily hide or show columns as needed, creating an easily changeable personalized view of student grades and submissions.
    • Benefit: Improves gradebook organization, reduces visual clutter, and enables faculty to focus on specific grading tasks.

  2. Gradebook: Direct Grade Entry:

    • Description: Faculty can enter grades directly in the Grid view (spreadsheet format) or Submissions page, streamlining the grading process. This feature eliminates navigation through multiple screens, providing a more intuitive grading experience.
    • Benefit: Speeds up grading process, simplifies grade entry, and improves grading efficiency.

  3. Gradebook: Improved Bb Annotate:

    • Description: This feature enhances Bb Annotate, with improved performance and stability, providing a more reliable and consistent annotation experience. Faculty can grade student submissions, ensuring that formatting remains consistent across devices and platforms.
    • Benefit: Ensures consistent formatting during grading, improves annotation accuracy, and provides a seamless grading experience.

  4. Gradebook: Pop-Out Rubric:

    • Description: Faculty can grade student submissions using a separate, movable and resizable rubric window for enhanced viewing. This feature allows faculty to maintain rubric visibility while reviewing submissions, improving grading efficiency.
    • Benefit: Enhances rubric visibility, improves grading workflow, and streamlines rubric-based grading.

Course Management & Content Creation:

  1. Course Content: Folder/Module Conversion:

    • Description: This feature allows faculty to easily and quickly switch between folder (linear) and learning module (structured) structures to organize their course content. Faculty can adapt their course structure to best suit their teaching style and student needs.
    • Benefit: Provides flexibility in course organization, allows for customization of course structure, improves content management, and improves student navigation.

  2. Documents: Improved Resize Handle:

    • Description: Faculty can precisely re-size text blocks, image blocks, or other content elements in Documents by selecting the vertical edge. This feature provides greater control over document layout and formatting.
    • Benefit: Improves document formatting, simplifies content layout, and enhances document creation, providing a more intuitive editing experience.

  3. Enhanced Release Conditions:

    • Description: Faculty can set content release conditions based on student submission status such as 'submitted,' 'graded,' or 'not submitted' and easily view due dates directly within the easily accessible release conditions panel. This feature provides greater control over content access and availability.
    • Benefit: Enhances content control, improves content scheduling, ensures timely access to course materials, and improves student workflow.

  4. Simplified Video Creation and Management:

    • Description: Faculty can easily create, edit, and enhance with captions, annotations, or trimming video content directly within their courses, eliminating the need for external tools. This feature simplifies video integration, making it easier to incorporate multimedia into course content.
    • Benefit: Simplifies video integration, enhances multimedia content, improves video management, and increases student engagement.

Assessment & Evaluation Tools:

  1. Generate Question Banks:

    • Description: Faculty can automatically generate a variety of question types, such as multiple choice, true/false, and short answer, for their assessments from existing course materials such as documents, lecture notes, or presentations. This feature saves time on test creation and provides a diverse range of question types, providing a starting point for question creation.
    • Benefit: Saves time on test creation, provides diverse question types, and improves assessment development.

  2. Print Tests with Questions from Question Pools:

    • Description: Faculty can print tests with questions from question pools (collections of assessment questions), along with corresponding answer keys. This feature simplifies test printing and provides a convenient way to create paper-based assessments.
    • Benefit: Simplifies test printing, provides paper-based assessment options, streamlines test administration, and increases accessibility for students with technology limitations.

  3. Indentations Added to Discussions:

    • Description: Faculty and students can follow discussion threads and understand the flow of conversation more easily with clear and consistent visual indentations for replies. This feature improves discussion readability and facilitates meaningful interactions.
    • Benefit: Improves discussion readability, enhances discussion engagement, facilitates student interaction, and creates a more organized discussion environment for both instructors and students.

  4. Expanded Rubric Capacity:

    • Description: Faculty can now create rubrics with greatly expanded criteria and performance levels, allowing for more comprehensive assessments and supporting diverse evaluation needs, including those for accreditation. This feature provides greater flexibility in assessment design.
    • Benefit: Allows for more comprehensive assessments, supports diverse evaluation needs, and facilitates accreditation processes.
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