Effective Practices

As we gear up for the FA2026 semester, Instructional Technology is hosting Blackboard Week from August 10th to August 14th. Whether you are completely new to Blackboard or a seasoned pro looking...

After a year-long redesign with faculty feedback sessions – including on-site at UMBC – Blackboard will launch a new gradebook starting August 7, 2026. The redesigned gradebook grid view will...

Blackboard course shells for Fall 2026 were created on July 15, 2026. All Fall 2026 courses listed in the UMBC Schedule of Classes (SOC), regardless of designation as lecture, lab, etc, or...

In partnership with the Math and Physics Departments, the Division of Information Technology is pleased to announce a pilot for Gradescope, a feedback and grading platform that integrates with...

This month's Ultra update provides a new report that gives instructors class-wide rubric data at a glance, and a dedicated field that separates discussion context from prompt. Paired with clearer...

If you've ever run an Ally course accessibility report and found a long list of untagged PDFs, you know the feeling: the problem is clear, but the path forward is time-consuming. Tagging PDFs for...

What if a wrong answer could teach just as much as a right one? This month’s Blackboard update brings tools that let instructors do exactly that: Guiding students not just to the correct response,...

Imagine a student learning Spanish who relies on a screen reader to access course materials. They open a PDF of a restaurant menu and instead of hearing the items and prices their classmates are...

Accessible math content ensures that all students can fully engage with your course material. Yet mathematical notation remains one of the most common accessibility barriers in STEM courses. The...

During Summer 2026, DoIT staff and Blackboard will archive our entire instance of Blackboard, which will save individually backed-up copies of every course and organization through SU2023. Courses...