Email scheduled announcements in July's Ultra update

Tue, 02 Jul 2024 16:13:58 -0400
announcements, blackboard, printer-friendly-assessments, ultra-experience, ultra-update

Instructors often plan certain communications in advance to ensure students receive timely updates and critical information. This proactive approach helps maintain a structured learning environment and supports student success. For the July update, instructors will be able to ensure scheduled announcements in Ultra courses will also be sent as emails, if enabled. Previously, instructors could only email an announcement at the exact time when it was posted to the course. Now faculty can plan certain communications in advance for their courses and ensure those messages are received by students as soon as announcements are posted throughout the course schedule.

Last month, Ultra featured printer friendly assessments, allowing faculty to accommodate a wide range of solutions for testing. This feature has been well-received, providing instructors with greater flexibility in how they administer and review assessments. In July, the printer friendly format supports an answer key, which can be used for grading or study guides. Printing is not yet available for question pools or mobile.

Image 1: Example of printer friendly test with option to select answer key

Additional updates for July include:

When grading by student or question, instructors can now provide contextual feedback as recorded audio and video. Instructors can add recorded feedback to all question types.

The Needs Grading filter on the Student or Questions tab will now only display students or questions with ungraded attempts or responses that count towards Needs Grading.

Students can view overall and attempt-level feedback from the gradebook.

Anthology made several improvements to Group Submissions page to address overall performance and reduce the load time. For example, loading the Groups Submission page from the Gradebook saw an improved performance of 88% to 95% depending on the Gradable Items or Gradebook Grades view.

Faculty should see the latest updates in Ultra courses around July 4-5, 2024. The next update to our Ultra test environment will take place on July 16, 2024; release notes are posted to the What's New in Ultra that same week. Faculty who are interested in test driving new features before they are released to production should open an RT ticket to request early access. Please watch the FAQs, including the What's New with Ultra page, and myUMBC for additional information about Ultra.