Before using this tool ensure you have familiarised yourself with the practical and ethical considerations in the ‘Getting starting with Blackboard AI Design Assistant‘ guide
What are the AI Design Assistant general settings?
The Blackboard AI Design Assistant ‘general settings’ are designed to improve the focus of generated outputs. These are standard controls available in most of the tools, that help tailor prompts. The general settings are similar for each AI tool and use a simple, consistent panel (as seen in the example below). These are not relevant for AI Role play and Socratic questioning, which have their own panel.
How do I use the general settings?
When configuring your prompt, choose from the following options:

- Description Field: Enter detailed prompts to focus content generation, up to 2000 characters. See how to write effective prompts for Blackboard AI Design Assistant – AI Prompt writing.
- Context Picker: Use existing course content to guide the AI. You can select from most course areas, for example; course files, Ultra Documents, titles and descriptions.
- Cognitive Level: Choose from categories to configure outputs that align with Bloom’s Taxonomy levels; apply, analyse, evaluate or create.
- Complexity Level: Match the output language to the year or level of your course, the default setting is undergraduate lower division (levels are based on the American schooling system). See screenshot below.
- Generate title and advanced options: Check this box to obtain suggested titles, or change the language using the Advanced option to generate content in other supported languages. See the full list.
- Generate: Can be clicked multiple times to generate iterations of the output. Note, it is not possible to retrieve a previous iteration, each new generation is overwritten.
Level 1: Early Primary | Level 2: Late primary | Level 3: Early middle school | Level 4: Late middle school | Level 5: Early high school |
Level 6: Late high school | Level 7: Undergraduate lower division | Level 8: Undergraduate upper division | Level 9: Graduate | Level 10. Advanced PhD |
Additional controls not listed above (available for some other tools) include Number of Results, which allow you to decide how many output options are required.
Guide last updated on July 4, 2025