Effective Practices

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...

Have you ever spent more time wrestling with Blackboard's Groups tool than actually designing the group work itself, especially in a large course? The May Ultra update delivers meaningful...

Have you ever wrestled with Blackboard's group management -- spending too many clicks trying to organize students, waiting for pages to load in large courses, or losing track of who's assigned...

As announced last month, UMBC is working toward a campus-wide goal of highly accessible courses by the end of 2026. To help, DoIT recommends that faculty identify accessibility gaps in prior...

Blackboard course shells for Summer 2026 were created on April 16, 2026. All Summer 2026 courses listed in the UMBC Schedule of Classes (SOC), regardless of designation as lecture, lab, etc, or...

UMBC instructors are invited to "enroll" in the self-paced, online Course Roadmap to Equity (CoRE) Foundations training, which provides practical tools to achieve the ‘Strive for 85’ digital...

Blackboard is currently working on improving the Ally Course Accessibility Report. They are collecting feedback from users in a short survey to understand how you use it, what’s working well, and...