Ultra: what's changed and why

With Ultra, Blackboard undergoes its most radical change in its long history. Ulster has enjoyed a long, fruitful relationship with Blackboard since the early 2000s. Since then, Blackboard has proved to be an amazingly resilient and consistent tool. During that time, it has served content to tens of thousands of students 24 hours a day and sailed through the Covid response to hugely increased demand without skipping a beat. Why, then, is this change taking place?

This consistency comes at a cost: the blackboard interface has not evolved far from its foundation laid by WebCT in 25 years, and inexorably, the chasm between its front-end design and the accepted norms of online tools has grown more substantial over time.

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BBL circa 2007

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BBL 2023

In that time, UI design and User Research, enabled by advances in web technologies, have established new design paradigms based on our underlying blueprint. Our instinctive understanding and expectation of web application design, largely driven by Social Media applications and the Blackboard interface, have grown so far apart that Blackboard has become difficult to learn and use, creating unnecessary friction and cognitive load.

To catch up, a clean break was needed. With Ultra, blackboard redesigned the interface from the ground up according to these modern design paradigms.

Whilst this facelift may be disconcerting to new users, the learning curve is not as steep as one might imagine because beyond what you can see, Blackboard remains largely the same: Assessments, Tests, setting exceptions and availability, creating Announcements... the list goes on. It is all still there; it is simply easier to use, especially on mobile devices.

Some aspects have improved significantly. For example, communication has been overhauled and keeping all communication with students within Ultra is feasible.

There are some notable new additions, such as Learning Modules. These are designed to provide a better experience than folders on mobile devices and allow you to sequence resources and activities. In the same vein, the Document lets you embed resources (presentations, word documents, pictures, videos…) in a web-page-like manner.

Ultra is student-focused. The flat structure, single page, responsive design aims to give students access to the most relevant information as easily and quickly as possible by reducing the number of clicks and limiting unnecessary visual elements to a minimum.

Author:

Antoine Rivoire is an Educational Technologist in the Centre for Digital Learning Enhancement at Ulster University.

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