Blackboard Learn Ultra navigation provides a modern, responsive and interactive interface, enabling users to get updates from their courses, and to easily access courses and organisations.
TEL Tips
- The Home page has links to sources of help, and is also where we’ll alert you to new features in Blackboard, or when systems are undergoing maintenance work. Staff and students will see different content, as will users in the Henley Business School and at UoR Malaysia.
- On the Courses page you can filter by the courses you teach, filter by academic year, search for a particular course, and mark courses as favourites so they stay at the top of the list.
- Customise the images on your ‘grid view’ course cards by adding a banner to your course.
- Choose which Activity Stream notifications you receive by choosing the settings icon in the top right hand corner.
Explore the sections below to learn about the different parts of the Ultra Navigation and how they work.
Homepage
The first thing you see when you log on to Blackboard is the Home page. In Blackboard’s documentation this is referred to as the Institution page, but we have rebranded it as Home.
This is where both you and your students will be able to find links to our Blackboard help pages, and to the Service Desk to log tickets. There will also be links to various university services displaying on this page. We are able to customise what appears on this page, based on the role that each user has within the system. So we may choose to display different content to staff and to students, or to students at different campuses
Activity
Check here for an overview of recent activity via the courses activity and activity stream.
The course activity area will show a selection of your courses that have had recent activity – click on the View all courses button to jump directly into the courses area where you can filter and search your course list.
The activity streams show notifications under the headings:
- Important: Students are alerted to overdue assignments, tests, and graded discussions that need their immediate attention.
- Upcoming: Access your top five events that will happen in the next seven days. Select Show More for a complete list.
- Today: Access everything happening and due in the next 24 hours, including institution-wide announcements about emergency notifications and updates. If you added course announcements, they are here or in the Recent category for students.
- Recent: If you haven’t checked in for a bit, access activity items that were previously in the Today section over the last seven days. Students always receive reminders about overdue work in the Important section.
The courses activity each course will display three different icons with numbers next to each. These indicate:
- Assessment to mark
- Messages
- Student alerts
Student alerts can be set up in the Gradebook settings panel.
The activity stream will add notifications from particular activities on courses.
- New course content added
- Work ready to be marked
- Announcements from courses and organisations
- System announcements
The activity stream is not dissimilar to the stream of notifications you see on social media sites. It shows changes in all of your courses since you last logged on, and is designed to provide a quick snapshot of recent activity, rather than a permanent record.
- You can choose which notifications you would like to be added to the activity stream from a list available via the settings cog in the top right-hand corner of the screen. See the Blackboard help page on Notifications for further information.
- In the activity stream you can use the filter to focus on Marks and Feedback or Assignments and Tests.
Profile page
Some of the information here is pulled in automatically from other systems and cannot be edited. On this page you can:
- Edit your notification settings.
- Upload a personal image – see the Blackboard Profile help page, or this very short video showing how to edit your profile image.
Courses
Users have a choice of two views, as a list or as tiles.
Courses page list view
Courses page displayed as titles
- If your course doesn’t have a banner, Blackboard will automatically assign an image for your course in this view.
- If your course does have a banner, it may not display correctly here. The recommended size for banners is 1200 x 300 pixels, with a maximum height of 400 pixels.
Finding your courses
- Because we retain Blackboard courses for several years, all the courses which you still have access to will be listed under ‘Current Courses’, but you can use the drop-down list to select a specific academic year.
- You can also use the Filter to show ‘Courses I teach’ – this equates to the courses where you are an instructor.
- A particularly useful feature is the ability to search for courses.
- Courses which you want to access most often can be added to your Favourites, so that they always appear at the top of the list.
- Please note: Hiding a course simply hides it from your list, not from other users enrolled on the course.
Private / unavailable courses
Any courses shown here as ‘Private’ are unavailable to students. You can quickly make them available from this page.
List view
Tile view
For more, see the Blackboard help page: Find your courses.
Organisations
Organisations display in much the same way as courses. For teaching and learning Organisations are used for school or department level information for students or for external examiners. There are also some Organisations for student services such as careers and study support. Please see our guide Blackboard Organisations for more information including how to request an Organisation.
Organisations are not associated with an academic year.
Calendar
You can create Calendar events for your course, and most course items with an associated date will appear here.
Due dates appear here, although it’s worth stressing to students that they should not rely on the Blackboard Calendar for their assessment due dates and should always check these in the course itself. The Calendar will show all assessments for the course – including those which the individual student may not need to submit to (for instance post-deadline assignments when the student has already submitted on time, or where there are assignments with rolling deadlines).
See our article on the Blackboard Calendar.
Messages
Messages display only within Blackboard. And although new messages are clearly flagged in the navigation menu, for anyone who is enrolled on more than a handful of courses it is very difficult to locate which course the new messages have come from, in this area it is clear to see which course each message is from.
The tool has been configured so that students cannot create or reply to messages.
Marks
For staff
This area provides you with access to the Gradebook for your courses, and shows student submissions which require marking.
Click on the assessment to be taken directly to the submission inbox for that assessment.
For more, see our guide on Marks page.
For students
Students can use this area to access Marks and Feedback for all of their modules much in the same way.
Student guide: Finding your marks and feedback
Tools
This page gives you access to various central tools.
Content Collection
This replaces the previous ‘My Files’ tab. The functionality is unchanged.
Portfolios
Blackboard provides a simple portfolio-editing tool. This tool does not have a integration with the Blackboard Assignment tool.
If you are considering the use of a portfolio tool with your students, please get in touch with the TEL team for advice on the options available.
Application Authorisation
This page allows you to control any third party applications you have authorised from Blackboard. Currently you are unlikely to see anything listed here.
Admin
For Programme Administrators or others with some level of administrator rights for a School or Department, use this link to access the System Administrator page. Your permissions are not changed by the move to Ultra.
Guide last updated on August 8, 2022