9/21/23 - Presentation to SABO

9/21/2023  - Presentation to SABO - Blackboard Ultra

Link to presentation

Highlights

Tulsa Community College secured a license with Blackboard in the late 1990s. As early as 2015,  Blackboard,  now owned by Anthology, began updating the interface to better meet the needs of today’s learners. 

Ultra is cleaner, more accessible, and more intuitive.

The experience is responsive, and students have a consistent experience regardless of what device they are using to access.

The new interface allows us to continue integrating with our third-party partners, such as publishing companies,  Panopto, Packback, and many other tools that our faculty use to add engagement to their courses.

In the last two years, there have been tremendous gains in the features.  Faculty and students using the interface seem to be happy with it.

Fall 2023  

• 405/2197 of TCC courses are taught in the Ultra interface (18%)  

• 182/774  of our instructors are teaching at least one course using the Ultra Interface

TCC is taking an organic approach to the transition

Organic

Moving to Blackboard Learn Ultra organically allows for faculty selection to migrate when the time is right. 

This approach is only recommended for large institutions where instructors have full ownership over all courses, and there is wide variability in the structure and design of these courses that would make them very complicated to move to Blackboard Learn Ultra.  This accurately describes the landscape at TCC. Moving organically is slow, which leads to benefits and challenges.

Benefits

● You can provide a variety of training and enablement methods: in-person training,

self-paced, Blackboard Learn Ultra office hours etc.

● Instructors who move to Blackboard Learn Ultra early can become champions for

instructors who make the move later

● Any challenges you experience with the first courses you create in Blackboard

Learn Ultra can be used to adapt how courses are created for future courses.

Challenges

● The pace of the move is out of your control, and you will see peaks and troughs in

the number of courses being created in Blackboard Learn Ultra. This variability may be hard to predict and therefore difficult to plan for and support.

● You will have an inconsistent experience for students across your institution.

● Your institution won’t benefit fully from a modern LMS and the new features that

are regularly added to Blackboard Learn Ultra.

● You will need to support two LMS experiences simultaneously for a lengthy

period.

● If a significant number of instructors who are early movers to Blackboard Learn

Ultra isn’t open to the change, wariness about moving to Blackboard Learn Ultra

can take hold, slowing and even stalling the move.

About Instructor Choice view

New Blackboard courses for Fall 2023 will automatically be added in Instructor Choice view. That means you will be able to choose whether to continue using Blackboard Original for your course or change it to Ultra to preview it. Don't worry--if you don't like Ultra, you can change it back! You can learn about Instructor Choice view in our Knowledge Base article "Using Instructor Choice view to preview Ultra."