Blackboard monthly updates
Blackboard Ultra is typically updated on the first Thursday of every month following user acceptance testing from the Blackboard user community. Releases go live in Staging environments, the month before live release. You may find it interesting to keep on top of what new features are coming and you can do so via Anthology’s Blackboard Release notes.
Future: June 2025 (118)
Jumbled sentence questions will be available in Blackboard Ultra test, question menu and within the Ai design assistant. You can set up a test as normal and the jumbled sentence option is available in the menu.
Add in your question text and place square brackets around the words the students need to guess. then add alternative distractor answers:
Students will see the question text and instead of brackets, they will have a dropdown with a list of all the answers and distractors. Students can select the correct answer from the list.
Students will now have a numerical prompt beside the discussion tab alerting them to any discussions requiring responses:
Current: May 2025 release (116)
Here’s the highlights from the May release
Blackboard has now added a qualitative option to the rubrics, you can chose to make a new qualitative rubric or convert an existing rubric.
Attach the rubric to the assignment dropbox in the normal way. During marking you can now select a level for each criteria without an implied mark. You can then enter a mark independent of the levels chosen.
Text-based columns in Gradebook for entering non-numeric assessment info (32 character limit)
You can access this feature in Gradebook > Marks view and rolling your mouse over between the headings.
Click on the + and select Add text item
You can then add a name and descriptor, you can then enter your text for each student.
Students will see the item listed in their Gradebook:
Previous: April 2025 release (114)
The latest release, delivered in April 2025, includes:
Indicator (Reviewed/Not Reviewed) in Gradebook to show whether students have accessed their feedback
You can now check whether a student has checked their feedback. Go into Gradebook, select Students and the student’s name.
In the status column, you can then see whether the student has reviewed their feedback for each assignment.
Ability to print Blackboard documents
A new Learning Object Repository allows the same content to be embedded in multiple modules within Blackboard.
The Learning Object repository is a place to store institution-wide content; this global library will be available to all instructors. Items within the library can be added to individual modules. The university proposes to use the repository to store institution-wide content such as global policies and student support resources. Any changes to repository documents will automatically update individual embedded instances of that document across all modules.
The Learning repository is available under the Create dropdown menu in Course content.
At the moment the repository is limited to documents. You can select a document from the repository and insert it into your course content.
Previous: March 2025 release (112)
Blackboard AI Tools. Included in the latest release is Blackboard’s staff-facing AI Design assistant & student-facing AI Conversation tool. The staff-facing AI design assistant allows you to use AI to create, learning modules, assignment/journal/discussion prompts, rubrics and test questions. The AI Conversation tool is a student-facing chatbot. It allows students to participate in discussions with an AI persona. You select the type of conversation for the students to engage in: socratic questioning or role-play, then define a topic/ scenario and persona.
Pop-out Rubrics: You can now open your rubric in a new window when marking assessments in Blackboard.
New features are driven by the User Community and we encourage interested colleagues to join the Ideas Exchange to suggest and vote on enhancement ideas.
Related content
Centre for Digital Learning Enhancement
ulster.ac.uk/learningengancement/cdle