Feature highlights
Welcome to our Anniversary edition of blackboard update blog. These are some of the Blackboard Ultra features and updates released on June 5th 2025. Updates will be automatically available within your courses, organisations and content menus. You’ll find more detailed release notes below.
Dividers for Ultra Document Content
Student Activity Log Enhancements
Jumbled Sentences for Blackboard Tests
Bulk Edit Option for Gradebook Columns
Discussion Tab ‘New Content’ Counter
Accessibility Enhancements
Dividers for Ultra Document Content
Topic: Ultra Documents
Feature Details: A divider option has been added to the Ultra Document menu allowing a visible line divider between content.
What does this mean for you?: An additional item in the Ultra Document content menu allows you to add a line divider between content in your Ultra document. This will allow you to break up the content on the page for your students, making it easier to see the pre-reading, lecture slides, and post lecture content. These dividers are re-sizable so can be used across the whole page or in individual sections.
Guide: Create an Ultra Document
Student Activity Log Enhancements
Topic: Communication
Feature Details: The student activity log filters have been consolidated, for example all LTI access are under one section filter.
What does this mean for you? As well as monitoring each student’s overall engagement with the course, you can analyse individual activities by using the ‘Event’ filter (e.g. discussion reply, assessment started) filter. You can also download this information as a CSV file.
Guide: Student Activity Log
Jumbled Sentences for Blackboard Tests
Topic: Tests and Assessment
Feature Details: Jumbled Sentence question types now available in the Blackboard Test question menu.
What does this mean for you?: Jumbled sentences question type allows instructors to define one or more paragraphs with blanks for students to complete. Students can select the correct answer from a drop down list, instructors can add distractors to the list to challenge the students.
Guide: Create Blackboard Tests
Bulk Edit Option for Gradebook Columns
Topic: Gradebook
Feature Details: The Gradebook Column management menu now allows bulk edits to the column visibility and to the catagory.
What does this mean for you?: Column visibility options have been previously enabled, but we are highlighting the increased ability to change multiple columns at once. This could be to hide multiple Integrated [IC] Columns in the instructor view. Additionally columns without a category can be updated with the bulk edit feature, allowing them to be given a new catagory. This helps you with filters in the Gradebook.
Discussion Tab ‘New Content’ Counter
Topic: Discussions
Feature Details: The Discussion Tab will have the same indicator as Gradebook and Announcements indicating new content.
What does this mean for you?: Instructors and Students can now see the number of discussions which have new content. This helps highlight new content to users and reminds them to participate in the discussions.
Guide: Blackboard Discussions
Further Gradebook Accessibility Enhancements
Topic: Accessibility.
Feature Details: Gradable items tab in Gradebook allows keyboard navigation and better screenreader readability.
What does this mean for you?: This allows better keyboard navigation and improved accessibility of the Gradable Items table in Blackboard Gradebook.
Further Information: Further information can be found on the Feature Release Page
Happy Blog-iversary
Thank you for reading our Ultra Release Update Blogs and we hope you have found them useful over the past year. Please do get in touch if you think we can present the information in a different way or you would like to see more or less of anything.
If you have an idea for a Blackboard feature or improvement, please raise a ticket with the TEL Team.