As I mentioned before, this post series is about new Ultra features that are going to be deployed soon, just so you know what’s coming and are not surprised.
So what’s the new Ultra thing coming: some enhancements to the Ultra docs.
Currently when you create an Ultra document, things look like this:
This is the set of options for all the items you can include in your Ultra doc.
Enter the New Ultra Doc (drumroll):
You can see that the five original options are still there. But you get a couple of extra things.
The first one is knowledge check.
A knowledge check is an ungraded multiple choice question that you can add directly into your document, right after the relevant content so students can check their understanding. It has limited options (multiple choice / True or False / Multiple answers). And creating a knowledge check will not create an entry in your gradebook. When you click on knowledge check, you get this screen:
Once you create the question, it looks like this.
If you hover over it, the edit, resize, move, and delete options become available.
You can, of course, add as many knowledge check blocs as you want.
As soon as you save your document, this is what you will see for the knowledge check:
The second new option is Convert a file.
It’s exactly as the name indicates. Just to show you what this looks like, first, I upload a word document into my Ultra doc, using the File upload option:
Then, I will convert the same document, so you can see the difference:
Clearly, not all the formatting came through but you can edit the converted document, if you need. Now, the document I converted had limited formatting. If you have anything more complicated, things can get messy. If it is just plain text, you should be ok but this is still overall a bit clunky for my taste. So far, the only supported formats are word documents, odt, powerpoint files, and pdf.
Why would you consider this, as opposed to just upload your original file? Well, if you plan on using the AI discussion prompt generator inside Ultra, uploading files will not help. However, the AI will be able to pick up text directly in Ultra.
Anyhoo, these are the new options. This change should happen around early November.
The Learning Technologies office will offer a session for Ultra documents on November 8 at 2pm, in SRC 3016, so you can get some hands-on training. You can register from the Ultra website here. On that page, scroll down until you see this:
Then click on register.
