March update features regrading questions & discussion data

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 14:39:00 -0500
monthly-update, ultra-experience

Ultra developers continue to enhance the core functionality of essential tools. In the March 2019 release, instructors can now grant individual students additional time to access an assessment, even if it is hidden to other students. Additional attempts may also be configured, again for an individual student on an individual assessment. Test questions can also be edited and regraded.

Blackboard added three new metrics to the Discussion Analysis area of the Ultra Course View. In addition to sentence complexity, critical thinking, and counts of responses and replies, instructors and graders can view statistics for the number of substantive posts, lexical classification (counts of content and functional words), and the percentage of word variation in a student’s posts for a given discussion.

Activity Stream notifications now have granular settings for both students and instructors, giving them the option to choose which information they wish to receive. Settings have been reformatted so users can select to receive all notifications at a high level (e.g., new discussions, edited blog posts, items to be graded).

Other new features and enhancements for Ultra courses include:

A word count appears when drafting responses and replies in discussions in the Ultra Course View.

Instructors can now rename an LTI link from the gradebook in the Ultra Course View.

The Messages page in the Ultra Course View is now responsive for users on mobile devices.

The next update will be posted to our test site around March 12th and pushed to production around April 4th. Faculty who are interested in test driving new features before they are released to production should open an RT ticket to request early access.

Related link: What's New in the Ultra Experience?