Effective Practices

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...

Have you ever wanted students to see exactly what's expected of them in a discussion, without having to navigate back to the assignment details to check? Or needed to recognize that one group...

Blackboard is preparing to launch a completely redesigned gradebook this summer, including a faster, cleaner, and significantly easier-to-use experience for faculty. To ensure the update meets the...

Following Provost van Dulmen's November 2025 announcement regarding UMBC's commitment to digital accessibility, the Digital Accessibility Steering Committee (DASC) is launching "Strive for 85."...

UMBC will host three Fix Your Course Content Days, dedicated to improving the accessibility of digital course materials in Blackboard. During these three individual sprints, faculty, staff, and...