Assessment

Instructional technologies provide many opportunities to support assessment and track student performance in Blackboard.

The following articles provide details describing the best practices we regularly publish to support our pedagogical community of practice.

Showing items tagged ultra-experience. Show All

Print a Rubric for Saving or Grading in Blackboard’s November Update

Also available: Find any student in a group set

It’s week eight, and a student emails asking to move to a new project team. Every student in your 30-person group set is already assigned, so finding her means opening group after group until her...

Posted: October 29, 2026, 11:07 AM

Export Rubrics from Dedicated Hub in Blackboard's October Update

Keep AI conversations in the target language

Down the hall, a colleague teaching another section of the same course asks to borrow the rubric you spent a weekend refining. How do you easily share this rubric in a Blackboard format? Later in...

Posted: October 15, 2026, 3:30 PM

Restrict File Types in Assignment Submissions in Blackboard's September Update

Preview Outcomes mastery also available in gradebook

A student submits their essay as a Pages file. Another turns in a .zip when you asked for a single PDF. By the time you notice, you're chasing down a resubmission instead of grading. September's...

Posted: September 17, 2026, 3:00 PM

13 Tips to Get Your Blackboard Course Ready

Checklist to optimize your course before the semester starts

The week before the semester starts can feel like a sprint: A full inbox, a syllabus that still needs one more edit, and a course shell that isn’t quite ready for students yet. Before the scramble...

Posted: August 12, 2026, 10:00 AM

Blackboard's August Update Redesigns Grading, Navigation, and Group Tools

A quick rundown of what's new for faculty & students

Blackboard's August update is one of the bigger releases we've seen in a while, touching grading, navigation, assessments, and course workflows all at once. Here's what's changing, organized by...

Posted: August 7, 2026, 3:31 PM

Blackboard Launches New Gradebook on August 7

Same grades, less clicking.

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...

Posted: July 20, 2026, 10:00 AM

July Update Brings Rubric Evaluation Report to Ultra Courses

Discussion descriptions, AI conversation timers, course favs

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...

Posted: July 2, 2026, 10:29 AM

Smarter Feedback and Flexible Rubric Improvements Arrive in the June Ultra Update

Turn every answer choice into a teachable moment

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,...

Posted: May 28, 2026, 10:32 AM

Redesigned Groups, Cascading Release Conditions in the May Ultra Update

Smarter tools for course design and student support

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...

Posted: May 5, 2026, 9:03 AM

Blackboard's Groups tool gets a major redesign that makes managing students faster and easier

Preview it on our test server before it goes live on May 20

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...

Posted: April 27, 2026, 10:49 AM

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