Get ready for a new, more engaging online course experience at UA Little Rock! Blackboard Learn Ultra provides a modern and updated course view for users. Faculty and students will benefit from the sleeker design and responsive interface, allowing teaching and learning on any device.
Blackboard Learn Ultra: It’s never been easier to teach and learn
Experience Blackboard Learn Ultra. The new Ultra experience offers a simple yet powerful solution for teaching and learning that saves time and delivers a more connected learning experience.
Ultra Highlights
There are many differences between Blackboard Original and Ultra. Our current top five favorite features in Ultra are:
Drag and Drop Design
With Ultra’s drag-and drop design interface, uploading and arranging content in Blackboard is easier than ever. To start, you can drag files from your desktop and drop them directly into the learning module or content folder where they belong. Moving content items within a course is just a matter of dragging to the right spot, and keyboard shortcuts are built-in to help move through more complicated course structures.
Granular Course Copy
Ultra’s granular course copy tool makes moving content between courses easier than before. Now you can move an entire course in just a few clicks, and granular copy makes it possible to move sections of a course or even individual content items without duplicating content and making a mess in the grade book.
AI Design Assistant
Blackboard’s AI Design Assistant can help you improve your courses directly within the course interface. In addition to making recommendations for content item descriptions and royalty-free images, the Design Assistant can help generate rubrics and even create test questions based on your course files.
Simplified Navigation
Blackboard Ultra condenses course navigation into a more intuitive top navigation menu, where commonly used tools are kept. Course utilities are no longer buried in hard-to-find submenus, and everyone will benefit from Ultra’s responsive interface.
Course Management Improvements
Once your redesign is complete, you’ll find many benefits to making the switch in terms of course delivery with functionality improvements only available in Ultra.
General Information
Blackboard’s Instructor Tutorial Videos Explore Ultra design and workflows
Blackboard Help site to find out more directly from Blackboard, Inc. about Ultra
Timeline
The UA System has requested that all sites be fully using Blackboard Ultra beginning in Fall of 2025. A pilot group of University of Arkansas at Little Rock instructors are teaching some of their courses in the Ultra platform in Spring of 2024. Instructors are encouraged to begin transitioning their courses early by signing up for the Ultra Academy.
Migrating to Ultra
The Office of eLearning is planning a series of trainings and supports and more to help faculty and students transition smoothly to Ultra. These include a self-paced online course, course building help from Instructional Design, and the Ultra Academy, which will be offered multiple times throughout the year. Each course instructor should follow the Ultra Timeline for migrating courses below.
Ultra Academy
Ultra Academy allows you to build your courses in Ultra alongside other faculty with the guidance and support of our eLearning team. At the end of the Academy, you will have a course completely built in Ultra that is ready to meet our internal Quality Assurance standards for online courses.
How Do I Know if I am in Original or Ultra?
You will login to Blackboard as you usually do. In your course list, you will see all the courses you have in Blackboard Learn Original, and you will also see any courses that are being developed for Ultra. In the course list, Original courses will have a grey bar on the left; Ultra courses will have a color.
