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Discover proven strategies and practical tips from fellow faculty members to help you make the most of Blackboard Ultra in your teaching. This resource showcases effective methods for engaging students, organizing content, streamlining grading, and fostering a dynamic online learning environment. Whether you're new to Ultra or looking to enhance your courses, explore these best practices to create meaningful learning experiences and optimize your workflow with Blackboard Ultra.
Sara Almunina Viz and María Tajes have creatively integrated YuJa video quizzes into their SPAN3030 course to enrich student engagement and assessment. A YuJa video quiz is an interactive tool that embeds questions directly within a video, allowing students to actively engage with content and assess their understanding in real time. In SPAN3030, students watch curated video segments and respond to embedded questions that reinforce listening comprehension and language acquisition. These video quizzes offer immediate feedback, promote active learning, and foster deeper interaction with course material. By leveraging the integration between Blackboard Ultra and YuJa, Sara and Maria have cultivated a dynamic, student-centered learning environment that supports formative assessment, self-paced learning, and autonomous skill development. Their innovative approach illustrates how combining multimedia with instructional technology can significantly enhance engagement and improve learning outcomes in language courses.
Latifa Sebti in Special Education integrated the AI Conversation tool in Blackboard Ultra in DIS1010: Critical Thinking and Dialogue, to enhance student engagement and reflective dialogue. The AI Conversation feature enabled generative AI to support students as they participated in online discussions, offering real-time prompts that encouraged deeper thinking, elaboration, and academic discourse. In DIS1010, this tool helped students engaged more meaningfully with complex topics while developing their critical thinking and communication skills. By integrating AI Conversations into the course, Latifa created a more dynamic and student-centered learning environment. Students benefit from guided support as they compose their discussion posts, which not only strengthened their reasoning and writing but also built confidence—especially for those who may be hesitant to contribute. Additionally, the tool helped maintain the quality of discussions while reducing the instructor’s moderation time. This approach demonstrated how thoughtful use of Blackboard Ultra features can improve both the student experience and instructional efficiency.
Daniel Verina, instructor for Nursing 5461: Advanced Pathophysiology, introduced an innovative approach to using the Blackboard Discussion Board to enhance student engagement and promote structured peer interaction. In this redesigned format, students were assigned to small groups, each responsible for responding to a specific immunology-related question. In addition to posting an initial response within their assigned group’s discussion thread, students were required to engage with peers from two designated groups, fostering broader dialogue and knowledge exchange. To maintain organizational clarity, students were instructed to post within existing threads rather than create new ones. The inter-group response structure is clearly mapped: Group 1 replies to Groups 2 and 3; Group 2 to Groups 3 and 4; Group 3 to Groups 4 and 1; Group 4 to Groups 2 and 1. This method promoted both individual accountability and collaborative learning. All discussion activities were evaluated using the course’s online discussion rubric, accessible in the evaluation rubrics folder on the course site. This model offered a scalable, replicable framework for faculty seeking to foster critical thinking and sustained engagement in online learning environments.
The achievements tool allows instructors and course designers to designate criteria for issuing rewards to students in the form of both badges and certificates. Students can see which rewards they've earned and what's required of them to receive additional rewards, providing insight into learning progression toward defined competencies. It allows faculty set performance criteria that students must meet to earn badges in the classes. In those crucial first few weeks of a semester, students are often trying to gauge how they're doing and what they can do to improve their standing in a class. Using a simple interface, faculty can create custom badges that students can earn based on their performance on assessments or by meeting attendance requirements, providing them with periodic milestones they can achieve on their paths toward successfully completing a course.
Perusall is used as an e-reader and social annotation tool to enhance student engagement and understanding of assigned readings. It allows instructors to upload course materials, and students can then read, highlight, and annotate texts online, facilitating discussion and collaboration around the material.Barbara Krasner, in History department, has been using Perusall, to increase her students' engagement with videos and PDF articles that she keeps in her Perusall library. An experienced user of the system, Barbara has been using Perusall for years. As she wrote when we reached out to her about her use of this tool, which is integrated in Blackboard and available for use in all course shells, "I ask students to highlight what excites them, confuses them, or fills them with dread. I require eight annotations per assignment, even if that assignment has multiple parts. These annotations can be what students highlight themselves or in response to their peers."
