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Progress Tracking

Student Progress Tracking
Students can track their progress in a course with visible icons. These icons indicate when they have begun or completed an item, helping them keep better track of where they are in a course.

Student Progress Report
With , instructors can see which students have not yet opened content, have started viewing content, and which students have marked the content as complete.

Discussion Boards

Group Discussions are managed on the activity, not in individual groups
There is no longer a need to create a separate group discussion for each group. The discussion is created first and then groups are added to it; students can see their group members on the discussion itself. Group discussions also no longer create multiple grade center columns and can be easily managed within a single grading interface.

Discussion Assessment and Student Response Analytics
Discussion Boards now provide . For the entire class/groups, analytics examine overall student participation, most commented posts, and the average grade of students. Individual student response analytics will also gauge student’s sentence complexity, lexical variation, critical thinking level, and word variation. SafeAssign for Discussions are also in Blackboard’s plans for Ultra.

Gradebook

Search and Filter in the Gradebook
In the Ultra experience, locating an individual student or item is now made easy with the Gradebook filter function. Simply select the student(s) and/or item(s) in the filter to narrow the results displayed in the gradebook.

Multiple Grade Views
In the Ultra experience Gradebook there are three separate views that help to manage and organize student assessment records: Gradable Items, which displays a list of all gradable activities included in the course; Students, which provides a page for each individual student, to allow you to privately discuss grades; Grades, which provides an interactive spreadsheet that displays all students and all gradable items in a spreadsheet format.

Complex Calculations
In the Original experience, you can create 4 types of calculated columns: Average, Minimum/Maximum, Total, and Weighted columns. With Ultra experience, you can create more complex by creating your own formulas including common arithmetic operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division – even using group operators (parentheses).

Save Grades to Post all at Once
In the Original experience, you had the option to save drafts of student feedback, but you needed to go into each saved draft manually to submit the grade and post it to their My Grades page. In Ultra, you can finish all the grading for an assignment and then Post All Grades at one time.

Automatic Zeros for Past Due Date Items
In Ultra Course View it is possible to enable the Gradebook to include automatic zeros for students who do not complete an assessment or activity by the due date.

Student Accommodations

Set Accommodations for a student once
You can set for students one time and the setting will be applied to all assessments and activities.

Announcements

Announcements appear as a pop-up inside the course
Whenever students log into an Ultra course, new announcements will pop up in a window that prevents them from accessing course materials without first dismissing the window.

Class Communication

Class Conversations
Enable Class Conversations to allow students to ask questions about content and discuss course materials, promoting a community of support and helping identify student understanding. Conversations on a group assignment allow students to collaborate directly on an assignment before turning it in. 

Course Materials

Embedded videos and HTML blocks in Documents
Create engaging lessons by embedding videos, HTML content, and downloadable materials seamlessly with your written text.

Batch (Bulk) Edit Content
Easily manage the availability of multiple items in your course . Show/hide all selected items or adjust all dates to make it easier when recycling content from copied courses.

Embed OneDrive Documents
You can embed such as word documents to be viewed directly from within your Ultra course. You can make the file view-only or downloadable as necessary.

Group Work

Group management is integrated in the course
Instead of needing to manage groups using a separate tool in Blackboard, groups are managed and members appear directly on the Group Activity they need to complete: , and even .