The new features in Blackboard’s October upgrade are available from Friday 4th October. This month’s upgrade includes the following new/improved features to Ultra courses:
- Students who have completed their studies no longer hidden in NILE courses
- Email notifications for followed discussions
- Auto-generate test questions in question banks
- End of life for guest access to NILE, including welcome courses and organisations, and removal of old Original courses and organisations (from 31st December)
Students who have completed their studies no longer hidden in NILE courses
Students’ NILE accounts are automatically made unavailable in NILE approximately one month after their status in the SRS (Student Records System) is updated from ‘Enrolled’ to ‘Award’. This has had the effect of hiding these students in their NILE courses, which has made it difficult for staff to view the assignments, grades and feedback of students who have completed their studies. Following the October upgrade this will no longer happen, and instead of disappearing from the gradebook and from the class register, students whose NILE accounts have been made unavailable will remain in their NILE courses, with unavailable students’ accounts marked with a strikethrough. Due to the way that Turnitin functions, unavailable students and their submissions will not be visible in the Turnitin submission inbox, however, the grades of unavailable students’ Turnitin assignments will be visible in the gradebook. Unavailable students’ Blackboard assignments, tests, journals and discussions will be fully visible in NILE.
Please note that the above change to NILE courses only applies to students who have completed their studies and whose NILE accounts have been made unavailable. It will continue to be the case that students who have been withdrawn from a module or who have transferred off a module will not appear in those particular NILE courses.
Email notifications for followed discussions
Following on from the August 2024 release, in which a ‘Follow discussion‘ option was introduced to Ultra discussions, the October 2024 release will allow staff and students to optionally receive email notifications for followed discussions.
Staff and students who opt to follow discussions will continue to receive notifications in the activity stream when there are responses and replies to the discussions they are following. Additionally, staff and students will also be able to receive email notifications when there are responses and replies to followed discussions, and these will be configurable in the email notifications section of the activity stream’s notification settings. Emails for followed discussions will be default on, and the default frequency for email notifications is ‘Email me once a day’.
Please note that the emails received for followed discussions will not contain the actual content of the discussion response or reply, but will only state that a response or reply has been made to a followed discussion, and will include a link to the discussion.
More information about discussions in Ultra courses is available from: Blackboard Help – Discussions
Auto-generate test questions in question banks
Following October’s upgrade, staff will be able to use the AI Design Assistant to auto-generate test questions in question banks. The question banks tool is available from the ‘Details & Actions’ menu in the content area of Ultra courses. Using question banks makes it much easier to reuse test questions in different tests, or to create a large pool of test questions which can be reused in tests which pick a random sample of test questions.
More information about using AI Design Assistant is available from: Learning Technology Team – AI Design Assist
More information about using question banks in Blackboard tests is available from: Blackboard Help – Question Banks
End of life for guest access to NILE, including welcome courses and organisations, and removal of old Original courses and organisations (from 31st December)
As previously announced in our Blackboard Upgrade – July 2024 post, in order to implement necessary security measures, from the 1st of January 2025 guest access to NILE will no longer be possible. This means that only logged in users will be able to access NILE. Guest access to Ultra courses has never been possible, however, some old Original courses, including welcome courses, may still be available via guest access and the information they contain may need to be relocated.
Additionally, please note that while most NILE courses are regularly archived and removed from NILE in accordance with the NILE Archiving and Retention Policy, some old Original courses and organisations remain on the system and will continue to be removed from NILE on a rolling ten year basis. Currently, all Original courses and organisations created before 01/01/2014 are no longer available on NILE, and courses created before 01/01/2015 will be no longer be available from 1st January 2025.
Staff who are concerned that they may be affected by either of these matters are encouraged to contact Robert Farmer, the Learning Technology Manager, to discuss their requirements. Where information needs to be available to people who do not have a NILE login, it will be necessary to use another platform to provide this. However, where using NILE is still the best option, we will be happy to provide a new Ultra course or organisation to replace the old Original one.
More information
As ever, please get in touch with your learning technologist if you would like any more information about the new features available in this month’s upgrade: Who is my learning technologist?
