Good morning, Instructional Colleagues,

I want to send this update to you before you take a well-deserved break from your teaching duties.  As of late last week, we concluded the 11-campus Blackboard Ultra Road Show.  At each campus, we hosted a combination of in-person and online attendees.  It was great to see so many of you and to answer your questions in real-time.  I am thankful for the partnership between Instruction and IT on these Road Shows and on this upgrade in general.  I also want to acknowledge the work of the LMS Transition Committee led by Dr. Beth Knight and Dr. Erasmus Addae, our Instructional Designers, and the Faculty Ambassadors who are all making substantial contributions to this project through planning, developing training, and so much more.

While we have already obtained feedback from many of you via the survey sent to attendees after each Road Show, I want to reiterate that this is a continually collaborative process. Please don’t hesitate to ask questions and share what you are ultra excited about. You can email blackboardultra@austincc.edu or check out the ACC Blackboard Ultra webpage at austincc.edu/blackboardultra

As we mentioned during the Road Shows, faculty will start seeing Ultra Build Out sites in Blackboard this summer – in the next few weeks.  This is where faculty can start to play in Ultra, explore its many features, and consider how they might use those features to support their course learning outcomes and course design.  I will send another message at that time with more information about the Ultra Course Build Out sites.  These sites are for faculty to develop (convert or build) their Ultra courses, and there will be plenty of time for these conversions.  While we will not ‘flip the switch’ and use Blackboard Ultra until the summer of 2025, these sites will allow for well-paced, quality course conversion/construction over the next academic year.  [Note: These Build Out sites have a shelf life, and you will need to copy content from them into your live courses next summer and fall 2025.  There will be ample reminder messaging prior to these Ultra Build Out sites being purged.]

On a related note, there is a workgroup just getting underway that will make some recommendations – via the shared governance process – for a baseline set of professional standards regarding the usage of the LMS.  This small but cross-sectional group includes: Cori Coburn, Tamy Chapman, Brian Bocknack, Christina Dittmar, Herb Coleman, Renee Kilbride, Stephanie Long, and Katie McClendon.  One of the first tasks this group will undertake is researching current LMS practices at community colleges within Texas and nationwide.

Finally, stay tuned for another message from me in the coming weeks about the launch of our in-house asynchronous Bb Ultra training, which you can take this summer at your leisure ahead of the in-person/HyFlex training in partnership with instructional departments this coming academic year.

I’m sure there will be lots of questions, so please refer to the Bb Ultra website and/or send your questions to blackboardultra@austincc.edu.  Thank you all for your continued collaboration on this upgrade!

Dr. Gaye Lynn Scott, Vice Chancellor of Instruction.

Members of the LMS Transition Committee (comprised of faculty, staff, and instructional leadership) are currently considering what professional standards would best support student success as we transition to Blackboard Ultra.

There are three main options for moving courses from the current version of Blackboard to Ultra: one is a more automatic option that converts materials quickly (on average, about 90 seconds), a second is to do a ‘granular’ copy of course elements from Learn into Ultra picking and choosing what is best to keep and what may need to be rebuilt, and a third is to rebuild entirely within Ultra.  The latter, while more time consuming, allows faculty to review their course design choices from the ground-up, leveraging best practices from the Quality Matters (QM) process. The existing complexity of the Learn course being converted will largely determine the workload involved with regard to the editing required post-conversion in Ultra.

Yes!  As mentioned above, courses and files contained within can convert via three main options. If faculty elect to use the automatic conversion process, they will get an ‘exception report’ that points them to aspects of the course that did not convert successfully and need to be addressed. The number of exceptions on this report will be relative to the compatibility of course elements pre-conversion. Note: Folders within the current version of Blackboard will likely convert to Ultra as modules.

Yes! Training is currently being developed by our office of Distance Learning in collaboration with faculty. This training will be both face-to-face/HyFlex and asynchronous, largely starting with the fall 2024 semester. There will also be a website/InfoHub available with resources and reference materials.

Much of the functionality of the original version of Blackboard will exist and actually be enhanced in Ultra. There will also be new features to augment and facilitate teaching and learning. One notable exception would be Wikis, which have yet to be released as part of Ultra.

Students will benefit from the more modern user experience within Ultra, which is very mobile friendly.

No, as it is much more straightforward for students. Other institutions have found this to be a smooth part of the upgrade process. Note: We do have a communication campaign for students – closer to the upgrade date – as part of our Change Management plan.

Yes! Ultra Build-Out Courses are scheduled to be available to all faculty by summer 2024 for each course they commonly teach (within the last year). These Build-Out courses are for faculty to use from summer 2024 through Go-Live. Courses developed within the current version of Blackboard can be converted into these Build-Outs or the Build-Outs can be where faculty completely rebuild their course (see #2 above). But the Build-Outs are not permanent! Once faculty teach each course associated with a Build-Out (i.e., copy the Build-Out to an upcoming, live shell), the Build-Out will be removed from our server to ensure we have enough storage for active courses.

Yes. There will be an overall course quota limit of 1G (most courses fall under this threshold already), and a process for requesting a pedagogically-necessary exception. 

Please reach out to us at blackboardultra@austincc.edu