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 universal-design-for-learning. Show All

When Good Design Is Invisible: Four UMBC Faculty Share How UDL Supports Student Learning

Small design choices make learning more accessible for all.

Students in Sarah Bass’s chemistry courses who use the course-grounded AI assistant say it feels like talking to their professor. Many of their classmates, though, don’t know the assistant exists...

Posted: November 3, 2026, 2:30 PM

6 Ways to Make Humanities Content More Accessible

The text matters. So does whether students can reach it.

A student pulls up the assigned primary source the night before class: a scanned nineteenth-century pamphlet, photographed at an angle, half the page lost in shadow. She can make out maybe...

Posted: October 27, 2026, 12:00 PM

6 Ways to Make Visual and Creative Media More Accessible

Art can challenge students without creating barriers.

A student opens the image for tomorrow's critique. The assignment asks her to analyze composition, contrast, and scale, but the image description says only, "abstract painting." She knows what...

Posted: October 20, 2026, 4:59 PM

6 Ways to Make Social Science Content More Accessible

Where evidence lives shouldn't decide who can reach it.

A student opens the assigned dataset the night before discussion, ready to test a hypothesis about voting patterns in urban counties. But the chart won't resize, the color-coded legend is...

Posted: October 13, 2026, 10:00 AM

6 Ways to Make Complex STEM Content More Accessible

Keep STEM rigorous while opening up student access

A student opens the problem set and finds an equation embedded as an image. She understands the math, but her screen reader can't interpret the notation. Later, the assignment asks her to analyze...

Posted: October 6, 2026, 10:00 AM

UDL at the Heart: Designing Learning with Every Student in Mind

Small design changes. Massive student impact.

Students don't all learn in the same way. They bring different experiences, strengths, needs, expectations, technologies, and approaches to learning into our courses. Yet many course designs still...

Posted: September 8, 2026, 10:00 AM