The new features in this month’s Blackboard’s upgrade will be available from Friday 8th August. This month’s upgrade includes the following new/improved features to Ultra courses:
- Improved student experience with learning modules
- Copying content between NILE courses
- End of Life: Padlet LTI NILE integration
- End of Life: Assist tab in main NILE menu
Improved student experience with learning modules
Following the August upgrade, the student experience of learning modules will be improved with the addition of a collapsible navigation panel, allowing students to more easily move between the items in the learning module. Currently, while students can progress to the next and previous items in a learning module, they do not get a sense of where they are in the learning module, and nor can they jump back and forth between items from within the learning module.
The current student view of an item in a learning module is as follows:
After the upgrade, all learning modules will automatically be upgraded to include a collapsible navigation panel, as shown in the screenshot below.
The new panel displays the contents of the learning module, allowing students to see where they are, jump between items, and mark items as completed from within the learning module. The ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ buttons continue to appear, and where students are working on a smaller screen device, the panel can be collapsed (the arrow pointing left in the top right corner of the navigation panel), allowing the learning module items to be viewed full width. Where ‘Forced Sequence’ has been specified, students will still be required to progress through the items in order, but once they have done this and they will be able to easily move between any of the items that they have unlocked.
Staff who would like to see how their learning modules appear to students can switch into ‘Student Preview‘ mode and view all aspects of their course as their students will experience them.
More information about creating learning modules is available from: Blackboard Help – Create Learning Module
Copying content between NILE courses
Staff need to take particular care when copying content from an old NILE course into a new one, because incorrectly copying between Ultra courses will cause problems later on. To help with this process we have produced detailed guidance on how to safely copy content between Ultra courses, which is available at: Learning Technology Team – How do I copy content between NILE Ultra courses?
And we’ve also made a video walkthrough of the process:
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.
In early September 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 with their students, but staff will now need to access Padlet via https://uon1.padlet.org (selecting ‘Continue with Microsoft’ and entering their UON username and password) and share their Padlets in NILE via web links rather than using the Content Market. No other Padlet functionality will be affected, and students will not need to login to Padlet to be able to contribute to Padlets that have been linked from NILE courses using web links.
More information about logging in, setting up and using Padlet is available from: Learning Technology Team – Padlet
More information about creating web links 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?
