What’s New in Blackboard
One of the hallmarks of Blackboard is the speed with which new features are developed and released. In fact, new features become available every month! Some of these features are large updates with entirely new functionality, others are very small enhancements that improve the teaching and learning experience.
PLEASE NOTE: Not all new features are always turned on in Blackboard. We may still be testing items or need more time to release them as we gather faculty feedback.
New Features for October
Students
-
Start AI Conversations in a new immersive experience – 4001.2: AI Conversations now open in a dedicated, focused view that gives students more space to engage with Socratic, Roleplay, and Pulse Quiz activities while hiding setup and assessment details that are not relevant during the conversation. Students explicitly start the conversation with a new Start conversation button, creating a more intentional and distraction-free experience without changing how instructors create AI Conversations.
-
Extend Your Top To Dos feature flag to August 2027: Your Top To Dos provides students with a single, focused list of their most urgent deadline-driven tasks on the Courses page, with direct links to complete them. The administrator-managed feature flag will now be in place until the August 2027 release, giving institutions additional time to evaluate the feature and provide feedback before it becomes the default experience for all students.
Students and Instructors
-
Quiz Students with the New AI Conversation Type Pulse Quiz: Pulse Quiz is a new AI Conversation type that generates course content-grounded questions in real time, with an instructor-defined persona guiding students through a quick, low-pressure knowledge check. Each student receives a unique quiz experience, helping reinforce learning and self-assessment while allowing instructors to review conversation transcripts and provide feedback without relying on automatic grading.
-
Lock an AI Conversation to a Specific Language: Instructors can now enforce a language for AI Conversations, ensuring the AI responds in the selected language throughout the entire interaction, regardless of student requests or the language of the source content. This helps maintain consistent language immersion and practice across AI Conversation activities.
-
Specific members rule no longer blocks other release conditions: Release conditions now work together as intended. When you add a “Specific members or groups” rule alongside other rules, such as date-based access, students who meet any rule can see the item. These students also show up correctly in the gradebook and grading views. This update will be included in the October 15 production release.
Instructors
-
Improvements to the beta Content Editor in Blackboard Documents: We’ve made a number of improvements to the beta Content Editor that make it faster, more predictable, and more accessible to use. These updates include keyboard navigation, list behavior, file and image handling, and new math authoring support.
-
Manage rubrics from a dedicated course rubrics page: Rubrics now have a dedicated management page in the course, replacing the previous workflow of managing rubrics directly within the Gradebook Settings and Assignment Settings panels. The new page displays all course rubrics in a sortable, searchable table and includes options to create, generate, import, export, duplicate, and delete rubrics.
-
Export and import rubrics: Instructors can now export rubrics from their course and import them into other courses, making it easier to reuse and share rubrics across courses.
-
View exception indicators in the gradebook grid view: Instructors can now identify students with exceptions at a glance directly from the gradebook grid view, without having to select individual cells.
-
Display username and last access date in the gradebook grid view: Instructors can now display username and last access date as optional columns in the gradebook grid view using new toggles in Gradebook Settings.
-
Display points possible in the gradebook list view: Points possible is now displayed as a sortable column in the gradebook list view, giving instructors an at-a-glance view of point values for each gradable item.
Share Your Suggestions for Blackboard Updates
Do you have an idea for an improvement to Blackboard? Use the Anthology (Blackboard) Idea Exchange! We encourage you to use the Idea Exchange to recommend changes to Blackboard, and to support ideas presented by other faculty. You can upvote existing posts to show your support and encourage Anthology to prioritize implementing these ideas in Blackboard. If you post to the Idea Exchange, please let us know so we can upvote your recommendation!
