As I finish this first year as Faculty Chair of Online Quality and Learning Technologies, I just thought I’d offer a recap of all the content I created over this academic year.
The Foundations courses
The very first thing I did was redesign entirely the LT course Foundations of Online Teaching with Gabi Frahm, and started offering it in Ultra. And based on the feedback from the faculty who took this new version last Fall, Gabi and I decided to create a second part to this Foundations course. We offered it for the first time this Spring.
We are offering both courses this Summer. They are both NET courses (but part 2 has 2 Zoom / Teams sessions), and run for 5 weeks:
Both courses apply to pretty much any delivery mode. They might be especially helpful if you have taken all the Ultra training on offer, but now, you just need to sit down and convert your courses and would prefer to do it in a collaborative environment with some (mild) accountability.
If you still need Ultra training, bookmark this page for the latest information on available sessions, synchronous, and asynchronous training.
As you know, Fall 2025 will be the last time courses will be taught in Blackboard Original. So if you are ready, I would recommend not waiting for Spring 2026 to switch. Do it now, or at least do it in Fall 2025 so the Learning Technologies office is not overwhelmed with requests for assistance during Winter break.
Ultra is also much better for accessibility, and, by now, you know that we are under deadline to get all our web content properly accessible by April 2026.
And yes, I’ll still be bugging y’all about the OSCQR rubric.
Blog Posts
This year, most of the content I created was in the form of blog posts. They are organized by topics below:
Ultra Transition
Ultra Transition – Where Are We At?
Blackboard Ultra
Getting the Most Out of The Ultra Calendar
Do One Thing in Ultra: Set Your Office Hours in the Calendar
Do One Thing in Ultra: Add a Rubric
Do One Thing in Ultra: Giving Feedback
Do One Thing in Ultra: Setting up Automated Feedback
Do One Thing in Ultra: Hide Dropped Students from The Gradebook
Do One Thing in Ultra: Change Your Overall Grade Scheme
Do One Thing in Ultra: Create a Test from a Test Bank
Do One Thing in Ultra: Create a Learning Module
Do One Thing in Ultra: Import a Test Bank
Do One Thing in Ultra: Add a Course Banner
Do One Thing in Ultra: Set a Release Condition based on Submission
Get The Most Out of The Ultra Calendar
New Blackboard Features: Course Cross-Links
YuJa
Why You Should Use YuJa for Your Videos
Do One Thing in YuJa: Adding Indexes
Do One Thing in YuJa: Deleting a Playlist
Do One Thing in YuJa: Remove Unwanted Video Segments
Do One Thing in YuJa: Fix Your Captions
Do One Thing in YuJa: Organize Your Videos in Folders
Do One Thing in YuJa: Create and Share Playlists
YuJa Panorama
RIP Ally, Long Live YuJa Panorama
Do One Thing in Panorama: Get a Coursewide Accessibility Score
Do One Thing in Panorama: Adjust Your Video Descriptions
Other Tech Tools
RIP Flipgrid, Long Live GoReact
Taking Attendance with Qwickly
