Feature highlights
This video shows you some of the Blackboard Ultra features and updates released on February 6th 2025. Updates will be automatically available within your courses, organisations and content menus. You’ll find more detailed release notes below.
Upload Images to Documents
Test Setting Improvements
Improvement to Uploaded Documents in Assignments
Improvement to Uploaded Documents in Content
Enhancement to Course Groups
Upload images to Documents using the new image block
Topic: Content
Feature Details: Uploading an image is now one of the document content options.
What does this mean for you?: Documents can now have more appeal with images being able to be added next to text or as part of the a document. These can be seperately added rather than uploaded as part of text content allowing more flexibility to their position on the page. Images can be resized to fit.
Guide: Create an Ultra Document
Test Settings usability improvements
Topic: Assessment
Feature Details: The test settings panel has been simplified to better reflect the relevant options for test set up.
What does this mean for you?: Initially Blackboard Tests and Assignments shared the same canvas, with some options automatically becoming unavailable when questions were added to form a test. In the recent developements to distiguish tests from assignments, some settings irrelevant to tests have been removed in order to make the settings panel more managable. You will notice slight differences, but the functionality available for tests will remain the same.
Guide: Blackboard Test Settings
Improvement to rendering in Blackboard Annotate
Topic: Tests and Assessment
Feature Details: Files submitted by students will now be rendered with the same formatting as the submitted document.
What does this mean for you?: When students submitted files to Blackboard Assignments, they were rendered into a useable format for Blackboard. However, this sometimes altered the formatting, especially around mathematical notations. Now Blackboard will keep the original formating to allow for more accurate reviewing of student papers.
Guide: Submit to a Blackboard Assignment
Improvement to rendering of uploaded files
Topic: Content
Feature Details: Files uploaded to Blackboard by instructors will now be rendered in their original format.
What does this mean for you?: Just as files uploaded by students in assignments were subject to change, so files uploaded to the content area were also subject to inacurate rendering by Blackboard. The content will now be kept in the original format.
Enhancements to course groups
Topic: Groups
Feature Details: All groups are now course level groups . Any groups based on activities can be used in the course. These will not be duplicated.
What does this mean for you?: When creating group activites, you are able to create course groups which can be used for multiple content. If there are no groups, and you create new groups in a discussion or group assignment, these will now be available throughout the course. Additionally you will be notified of any empty groups within the creation process.
Guide: Blackboard Groups
If you have an idea for a Blackboard feature or improvement, please raise a ticket with the TEL Team.