The new features in this month’s Blackboard’s upgrade will be available from Friday 4th July. This month’s upgrade includes the following new/improved features to Ultra courses:
- New 25/26 NILE courses now available
- Review student engagement with announcements
- Add captions to image blocks in Ultra documents
- Support for QTI question banks import
- Enhanced pop-out rubric
- Change of terminology – grades to marks
- End of life notification: Padlet LTI NILE integration
- End of life notification: Assist tab in main NILE menu
New 25/26 NILE courses now available
New module-level NILE courses for the 25/26 academic year are now available. Programme-level NILE courses are expected to be available by the 9th of July.
Full guidance about finding and setting up NILE courses is available from: Learning Technology Team – Getting your NILE courses set up and ready for teaching
Please take particular care if you are intending to copy content from an old NILE into a new one as incorrectly copying between Ultra courses will cause problems. Guidance on how to safely copy content between Ultra courses is available from: Learning Technology Team – How do I copy content between NILE Ultra courses?
Review student engagement with announcements
While the current version of NILE shows how many students have viewed each announcement, no information is available about which particular students have and have not viewed an announcement. Following the July upgrade this information will be available by selecting the number of viewers.
Where announcements are also sent by email (i.e., when the ‘Send an email copy to recipients’ box is ticked when posting the announcement), please bear in mind that NILE is not able to determine whether or not students have read the emailed copy of the announcement. The announcement viewers information in NILE only records views for students who have opened the announcement in the NILE course.
Upon selecting viewers, the course announcements panel will open, providing information about which students have read the announcement and which have not. The panel also allows staff to filter the list according to whether students have read the announcement or not, and from here staff can also select students individually or in bulk and can send a message.
Add captions to image blocks in Ultra documents
Following Friday’s upgrade staff will be able to add captions to images in Ultra documents which have been added using the image block.
Support for QTI question banks import
Friday’s upgrade introduces support for importing test questions in QTI 2.1 format. Where staff have purchased banks of questions that are in the QTI format (which is the most common standard format for question banks) from third-party suppliers, these can now be uploaded directly into NILE courses via the Question Bank tool.
Enhanced pop-out rubric
The July upgrade will introduce the following changes to Blackboard rubrics:
- Attempting to close a pop-out rubric without saving the changes prompts a warning, reminding staff to save their changes;
- Selecting ‘Save’ no longer closes a pop-out rubric;
- Keyboard navigation will be improved, specifically arrow key and tab interaction, for the grid table.
Change of terminology – grades to marks
Following the terminology update to some of the grades transfer tools earlier this year, all remaining references in NILE to ‘grades’ will be replaced with ‘marks’ prior to the start of the 25/26 academic year.
End of Life: Padlet LTI NILE integration
Important Note: Padlet itself is NOT being removed – only the method of sharing Padlets with students is changing.
At the end of August 2025 Padlet will be removed from the Content Market in NILE, meaning that all links to existing Padlets which have been embedded in NILE courses via the Content Market will stop working and will become automatically hidden from students.
UON staff can continue to use Padlet as normal with their students but will need to access Padlet via https://uon1.padlet.org (selecting ‘Continue with Microsoft’ and entering their UON username and password) and share their Padlets via a weblink rather than using the Content Market. No other Padlet functionality will affected.
More information about logging in, setting up and using Padlet is available from: Learning Technology Team – Padlet
More information about creating weblinks in NILE courses is available from: Blackboard Help – Web Links
End of Life: Assist tab in main NILE menu
Blackboard have recently announced the end of life for the Assist tab which appears in the main NILE menu and which provides students with information about University support services, etc. The Assist tab will be removed from NILE in early September 2025.
In order to provide students with information in NILE about the University’s support services, the information which currently appears in the Assist tab now appears in all 25/26 programme and module-level NILE courses in an item called ‘Help and support for UON students’*. In programme-level courses this is in the ‘My programme’ area of the course and in module-level courses this is in the ‘About this module’ area of the course.
Please note that the ‘Help and support for UON students’ item cannot be edited by staff as it is managed and maintained centrally.
*In courses taught by partners the item is called ‘Help and support for students studying with partner institutions’ and only includes information relevant to partner students.
Learning technology / NILE community group
Staff who are interested in finding out more about learning technologies and NILE are invited to join the Learning Technology / NILE Community Group on the University’s Engage platform. The purpose of the community is to share information and good practice concerning the use of learning technologies at UON. When joining the community, if you are prompted to login please use your usual UON staff username and password. By joining the Learning Technology / NILE Community you will receive calendar invitations to our regular live community events:
Join the Learning Technology / NILE Community Group
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?
