In Blackboard Ultra Course View, navigation is streamlined to help students easily access course materials and tools. The top navigation bar provides quick access to important features like Content, Calendar, Announcements, Discussions, Gradebook, and Messages. The Details & Actions panel on the side includes options for viewing the course roster, checking your progress, accessing attendance records, joining groups, and using course-specific books and tools. The main area displays all course content, which can be browsed by expanding folders or learning modules. New activity is highlighted with notification icons, and you can search for specific course materials by title using the search feature.

See the Navigation Inside the Course Help article for more information.

Create an Introduction Video

A quality introduction video shows that you’re prepared and provides a good first impression for your students.

Whether you're just starting the design process or a seasoned online instructor, you can add an engaging introduction video to welcome your students. A short video is an easy way to make connections with your students.

Your introduction video can humanize the online experience for all students, but especially for the more hesitant and new users. You can help students realize that their instructor is a real person with enthusiasm for the subject matter. When you establish a social presence with videos, you build rapport with students and foster a sense of community.

Instructor videos can replicate the face-to-face interactions in the traditional classroom. You can ignite excitement about your course and explain how relevant the content is to them. You can give students a taste of your personality and dispel fears about the online learning environment.

Presenting Content

Outstanding online courses begin with outstanding content presented in a way that minimizes barriers to understanding.

Effective content design can create a more compelling and engaging showcase for your course material. Well-designed content can help your content meet these needs:

• Ease of learning: How quickly can a new student navigate through your course while learning the material?
• Efficiency of use: After students are familiar with your course setup, how quickly can they accomplish tasks?
• Subjective satisfaction: How much do students enjoy working through your course material?
• Usability: Can users with different levels of ability, experience, knowledge, language skills, hardware, or concentration level use your course easily?
• Accessibility: You want people with disabilities to receive the same level of information, services, and use that people without disabilities receive. Is your course a level playing field?

Effective design can also be a simple and straightforward design. Clean and simple can be aesthetically pleasing and still have an impact.

A well-designed course requires planning. You must consider not only visual design, but also writing style, tone, arrangement of information, and accessibility.

See the Presenting Content Best Practices Help article for more information.

Create Content

Your course creation starts on the Course Content page. You'll find it's easy to discover features and complete actions.

To add content, select the plus sign wherever you want to add content. You can also expand or create a folder or learning module and add content. Create new content, upload something you already have, or add content from external sources or from another course.

See the Create Content Help article for more information.

AI Design Assistant

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become ever-present, and Blackboard Learn is no exception! There is now an AI Design Assistant available in Blackboard Learn Ultra that can help you with a variety of tasks related to your courses. Along the way, you can review, edit, and approve auto-generated content, based on what you want to offer. Some of the tasks it can help you with are as follows:

• Course structure: The AI assistant will help to auto-generate learning module titles, descriptions, and images based on course objectives.
• Discussions: Discussion topics can be generated based on descriptions and objectives.
• Test question generation: The AI assistant will automatically generate test questions related to the assessment and objectives.
• Assignment prompt generation: Assignments are generated based on course content.
• Image generation: Generate a course banner and learning module images based on descriptions.
• Rubrics: Allow the AI assistant to generate a rubric based on the assignment instructions.

See the AI Design Assistant Help article for more information. This help article also contains several videos you can watch on the different AI options.

The AI Design Assistant is available on a per user basis. Instructors will need to fill out the NDSU Blackboard Ultra AI Design Assistant Request form to gain access to this functionality.

Mobile-Friendly Courses

You can optimize course content to be sure that the materials you publish in the Blackboard environment display as you intend on the mobile apps. The best way to create mobile-friendly content is to try out your course on a mobile device.

The Blackboard app handles many of the content types presented in your Blackboard course, but it is not designed to handle every possible type of content. You can edit your course content so that it translates well to a mobile device.

See the Create Mobile-Friendly Content help page for information including previewing your course on the mobile app, using supported file types, reducing the number of course items, using short titles, and using due dates

Release Conditions (formerly called Adaptive Release)

When you customize the release of content, you create a course that's more interactive and tailored to the needs of individual students. In the Ultra Course View, you can use the release content features to show the appropriate content, to select individuals, at the appropriate time.

Instructors can release content based on dates, performance, in sequential order, or by users or groups.

See the Release Content Help article for more information.

Reuse Content

You can copy an entire course, share content with other instructors, or save your course as an archive.

See the Reuse Content Help article for information on copying content from courses, copying complete courses and exporting and archiving courses.

Copy Content from Other Courses

Creating content for your courses takes time and thoughtful planning. If you teach multiple courses that use similar content, you may want to copy content items and folders between courses to help save time. In the Ultra Course View, you can copy content from other courses you teach, so you don't have to start with a blank slate.

You can quickly build your list of content to copy from another course. You can choose to copy multiple pieces of content across your courses, including all content in your courses.

See the Copy Content from Other Courses Help article for information on copying content, supported content types and issues and exceptions with copying content. You can also watch the Copy Course Content from Original to Ultra video for an introduction on how to reuse Original course content for an Ultra course.

Copy Courses

Ultra allows instructors to duplicate course content from within the Ultra courses they're teaching. This feature lets instructors or anyone who creates or adds content to Ultra select individual course items or entire folders. The ability to copy content items and not recreate content from scratch provides a time-saving solution for instructors building their courses.

See the Copy Courses Help article for instructions on how to copy course content as well as a list of items that can be copied.

Batch Edit

Content management is a time-consuming part of course setup and maintenance. Instructors spend valuable time carefully organizing content and assessments and release it for students to access at certain times.

In the Ultra Course View, you can use Batch Edit to update common settings across all content, such as visibility and due dates. You can also use the tool to delete a group of selected course content. With Batch Edit, you can control content settings in one place and all at once.

See the Batch Edit Help article for more information.

Adding Media

Uploading and sharing multimedia content is a key part of engaging with your students in a Blackboard Ultra course. With Ultra Course View, you can easily add files, images, videos, and audio to your course materials, whether you're submitting assignments, preparing presentations, or enriching discussions. The platform supports a variety of content types and provides straightforward tools to help you upload from your device, embed media from the web, and format your materials for the best possible learning experience.

See the Add Files, Images, Video, and Audio Help article for more information.