Try Ultra Course View
Ultra Course View is clean, modern, easy-to-use, and powerful, but it is also significantly different from Original Course View. Before switching a course to Ultra Course View, we recommend experimenting with using a development shell.
Requesting a Development Shell
A development shell is identical to a course, but it is not connected to Colleague and has no student data or dates attached to it.
All faculty (both full-time and adjunct) will receive two development shells in Ultra course view: a blank shell named “Ultra Development Shell” and a shell named “Ultra Development Template” with template content, so you don’t have to start from scratch. You will be able to find both by navigating to your Courses page in Blackboard and either entering “Ultra” in the search box or navigating to the Development term. The purpose of these two shells is to give you full control over your development preferences while still providing guidance on where to get started.
Need additional dev shells? Please click the link below and a request will go to Learning Technologies where a development shell will be created. You will receive an email as soon as the process is finished along with Ultra Course View resources and further support information.
Support for Getting Started
All faculty are enrolled in the Faculty Ultra Resources & Support organization (found under the Organizations section of Blackboard’s base navigation menu). The organization serves as a hub for Ultra support and contains on-demand training and resources. The announcements area of this organization will be used to keep you informed on the latest product developments and any known issues with the platform or integrated tools (like publisher sites or other platform integrations). You can always call or email LT, too!
A companion organization was also created for students. All faculty and students have access to the Blackboard Student Support organization which includes onboarding materials for both Original and Ultra course views as some students will have courses in both views during the transition process. This new organization replaces the legacy “Orientation to Online Learning” course that students were previously enrolled in.
Next Steps
Once you have a shell, you can start pulling over content from your previous courses. Please use the below resources to get started copying your course content and also the five things you should know when getting started with Ultra.
- Copying Course Content from Original to Ultra (Video) – Copying a course directly from Original to Ultra is not recommended, as things can get messy. This short video walks users through copying over content with intention.
- Getting Started with Ultra: 5 Things to Know - This short video is a great introduction to Ultra and covers how to locate tools, edit a course image, add content, batch edit content, and the student preview mode.