What is the Plan?
Starting with Fall Term 2026-2027 offerings, all new Blackboard course sites will use the new Ultra course view. Existing department, program, committee, and club courses will need to be converted to Ultra course view by the start of Fall Term 2027.
Let CETL Help You Make the Switch
We know this will be a difficult move for many. Regardless of your confidence level, CETL wants to help you get up to speed. Starting today, we are offering an array of services to help you get comfortable teaching with Ultra-style course sites. There is no need to wait till Fall 2026 to make the change. In fact, you might consider running an Ultra course or two in 2025-26, to smooth the transition.
Training
Over the course of the 2025-26 academic year and into the future, CETL will be offering a series of face-to-face and online workshops to help faculty create and run Ultra-style course sites. We will be starting with a summer Ultra Bootcamp for faculty who want to get up to speed quickly, and in the fall, CETL will roll out a series of synchronous and asynchronous workshops and classes to help you get ready to switch or reinforce your skills if you have already taken the plunge.
Course conversion
If you have been teaching in the old style, you probably have at least one, if not several, well-developed course sites that you will want to move to Ultra. While you cannot copy old-style courses into the new style, you can upgrade an old-style course to the new. If you have old style courses that you would like to convert, place a request using this form.
CETL will then copy your requested existing course into a development site and convert that site to Ultra. That will give you a basis to start re-organizing from, if needed.
Consultation, individual training, mentoring
CETL is here for you if you want individual or departmental assistance. Our designers are always happy to meet with you, both individually and in groups, to help you get up to speed with the new Blackboard. Have a course that you are not sure how you will update to Ultra? Reach out to ask-CETL@udmercy.edu, let us know what course site ID you are worried about, and make an appointment to have a chat.
Beginning with the summer 2025 Blackboard Ultra Course Builders Bootcamp, CETL Designers will be offering mentoring opportunities for faculty who would like ongoing, in-depth support from CETL designer as they begin their Blackboard Ultra journey.
More information about our Blackboard Ultra Mentoring Program can be found on the Course Builder Bootcamp enrollment page.
If you have questions or concerns, please let us know!
Why Are We Making This Change?
Better for Students
Blackboard / Anthology may have forced our hand, but to be frank, now is the right time for this change. The biggest reason we support this transition is that it will provide our students with a better experience overall.
One interface is better than two. Ultra style course sites do not have the same look and feel as original-style ones. Navigation is dramatically different, and the process is slightly different for submitting assignments, posting to discussions, and taking tests. Currently, many of our students have both original- and Ultra-style course sites, which means in addition to their coursework, they need to manage using two different styles of course site. CETL has started hearing complaints from students about dealing with two interfaces and seeing an increase in the number of students who are having technical issues that result from having to perform the same task differently depending on the course site style.
Ultra’s simplified interface makes it easier for students to find content and assessments. The way Ultra presents folders, which expand to show their contents rather than launching a new page, makes finding content faster and more intuitive. Learning Modules, an alternative container for content and activities that encourages sequential viewing, are significantly improved from their original-style counterparts, providing both a list-view and a slide-view of the module’s contents. Ultra’s instructor-enabled Progress Tracking feature adds a checklist-style visual aid to items, helping students quickly see what content they have viewed and completed.
The Ultra-style course interface is mobile-friendly. Many of our students (and some of our faculty and staff) check in on their course sites using phones and tablets. Ultra-style courses are designed to be easy to navigate, regardless of your screen size. Original-style course sites are not friendly to smaller screens (the original style course design predates the iPhone).
Ultra style courses are more accessible. Some of the design and aesthetic limitations in Ultra style course sites are the result of a focus on accessibility. Ultra is easier to navigate with a keyboard, works better with screen readers, and even offers a guide that lets you see how accessible your content is and, if you like, can recommend changes to improve your accessibility score.
LockDown Browser is tightly integrated into Ultra-style course sites. To take a test in LockDown Browser in an original style course, a student needs to exit their browser of choice (Chrome, Firefox, Edge), then launch LockDown Browser from their desktop. Then, they need to log into Blackboard (using two-factor authentication, again), navigate to the course, locate the test, and launch the test. If the student does not follow these steps, they get a (confusing) page that tells them they need to enter a password to take their test. In Ultra, a student just clicks on the assessment that uses LockDown Browser: they get a details panel that provides an overview of the assessment settings (e.g., due date, time limit, remaining attempts, whether it uses LockDown Browser) with a Start Attempt button at the bottom. Clicking Start Attempt launches the assessment in LockDown Browser. No need to log in again, no re-finding the assessment. And if the student does not have LockDown Browser installed, they are taken to the LockDown Browser installer page.
Better for Faculty (Once We Get Used to It)
Blackboard continues to make a lot of quality-of-life improvements to Ultra-style course sites, adding features faculty have wanted for years.
Do not want your students to see the grades on an assessment until everyone has a score? Ultra gives you the option to manually post grades (and automatically zero any unscored attempts) with a single click. Want to apply LockDown Browser? A button in the assessment settings takes you right to the dashboard. Want to see how much time students are spending in your course, or check up on an individual’s activity? There is a whole analytics tab full of charts and graphs. Want to consolidate questions about a test or assignment into a single forum? Ultra assessments have a class conversations setting that creates an assessment-specific Q/A forum.
The list of both minor and major improvements is too long to enumerate, but here are some highlights that our faculty who are using Ultra have commented on:
Gradebook views are more flexible. An overview page lets you know what needs grading and what grades are waiting to be posted (i.e., the students have not received their grades). The gradebook itself offers an original-style grid view, a gradable items-first list that you can click into to see student submissions for grading, and a students-first list that shows their current overall grade which you can click into to see scores for each graded item.
Assignments can have test-like features. In an Ultra-style course, not only can you add a time limit to assignments (giving students some number of hours or minutes to complete the assignment once they have opened it) you can also apply LockDown Browser (and Monitor) to assignments just like you can with tests. This means you have the option to give an essay exam that lets you take advantage of Blackboard’s inline annotation tools when grading, implement a SafeAssign Originality Report, and make it significantly more difficult for students to use generative AI in their responses.
Testing is more flexible. In Ultra, you can add text blocks to your question flow, say if you want to ask a series of case-based questions, or questions that require a particular set of instructions. You can also break a test into pages of questions, providing a sort of middle-ground between all-at-once and question-at-a-time testing. If you like randomization, you can randomize pages and add blocks of randomly selected questions to pages (meaning you can have a fixed block of case study text, followed by a set of randomly selected questions related to that case). When necessary, faculty can also print tests from Ultra courses. If the test uses randomized questions, each print generates a new (randomized) test and answer key.
Copying content and assessments between Ultra courses is easy. Need to copy an item, test, or assignment from one course to another? In the original style, copying content meant going back to the old course and finding the item you want to push to the new. Unless it is an assignment, which can only be copied as part of a whole-course copy. Need to copy just one test? You are stuck with an export, import, re-add process. In an Ultra style course, you click copy in the spot where you want your copied content to appear, find the course, find the item. It does not matter if the thing you are copying is a document, file, assignment, or test. Blackboard has streamlined out all the fiddly little dependencies that makes original-style copying a minefield.
Batch editing is vastly improved. Ultra encourages you to use due dates on all your assessments – which, in turn, makes other features like Daily Notifications, the Activity Feed, and Course Calendar work better for our students. When it comes time to re-use an Ultra course from a previous term, the Batch Edit tool lets you adjust all the visibility, availability windows, and due dates for everything in the course from one screen.
Accommodations are applied to the student. Rather than having to add individual accommodations each time you add a test, Ultra lets you apply the accommodation to the student’s account in your course. When you add an assessment, accommodations are applied automatically.
Notable Changes
Making the transition will definitely require adjustment. Depending on how you use Blackboard to interact with your students, the transition may go more or less smoothly. Our conversations with faculty have identified a few areas that will probably require the most adjustment.
Ultra does not have a Send Email tool
Instead, Ultra uses messages. Messages can be emailed, but to reply, students will need to log into Blackboard and use the messages tool. Announcements can still be emailed to students.
3 sub-folder limit
A side-effect of the Ultra-style course site’s navigational simplicity is that it only allows 3 levels of folder depth. This constraint helps make content more findable for your students but will require rethinking how we organize courses with extensive content repositories.
When managing a merged course, Ultra’s Gradebook does not list currently Child Course Id
While the Gradebook does not include a “Child Course Id” column, there is a Gradebook filter that lets you display only members of a specific merged course. CETL will be modifying our course merge process to make these courses easier to distinguish and make it easier for faculty to target content and announcements to members of a specific child course.
Question Types
While the test creation process in Ultra is generally a little easier to manage, the following original-style question types are not available in Ultra: jumbled sentence, opinion/Likert, ordering, quiz bowl. CETL has not seen too many courses that use these question types (except ordering), but it’s worth mention.