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Blackboard AI Design Assistant – General settings

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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 Conversations (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:

  1. 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. 
  2. 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 (note: this setting is not available for AI Rubrics).
  3. Cognitive Level: Choose from categories to configure outputs that align with Bloom’s Taxonomy levels; apply, analyse, evaluate or create.  
  4. 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 table 1 below).
  5. 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. 
  6. 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.

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.

Complexity Levels

When selecting ‘Complexity level’ the slider refers to the following categories:

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 
Table 1: A list of the complexity levels and their corresponding schooling level, these can be used to focus language for Blackboard AI Design Assistant outputs.

Guide last updated on July 8, 2025

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