Configure Blackboard

By default, users start on the Activity Stream after they log in to Blackboard. You may want to display another area more prominently for users, especially if you've built an Institution Page with important and time-sensitive content. You can change the landing page to highlight more relevant information for your institution's users.

Users can use the course catalog to browse the available or upcoming courses at your institution.

To enable users to open and browse the course catalog in the Ultra experience, toggle on Link to Course Catalog. Available courses in the Original course view and the Ultra course view appear in the course catalog. Users can open the courses and view contents, but they can't interact with the content.

If your institution has access to the community engagement features, the organization catalog lists all organizations in categories, such as organization type or semester availability.

To enable users to open and browse the course catalog in the Ultra experience, toggle on Link to Organization Catalog.

If most of your courses/organizations have deeply nested content, you may want to enable additional nesting levels. The additional folder depth will reduce the "flattening" of course/organization content during the conversion process for these types of courses.

To enable additional levels, toggle on Activate an Additional Level of Nested Items and then complete the confirmation screen. For more information, see Activate an additional level of nested items.

Content areas in Original courses and organizations become learning modules when converting to Ultra. If you leave Convert content areas to learning modules toggled off, content areas become folders.Create Learning Modules

Learning modules provide improved student and participant navigation, allowing them to quickly move to the next or previous item while keeping track of their progress by seeing the number of completed items. Instructors and Leaders can personalize learning modules with thumbnail images and have the option to force students and participants to work through materials sequentially. For more information, visit Create learning modules.Create Learning Modules

In-product updates help users understand changes and effectively use new features. Product updates are brief mentions of what is new in Blackboard. User engagement surveys are brief polls launched to a small sample of users. Each survey has its own purpose. For example, a survey might ask users to rate their overall experience of a feature or workflow. For more information, visit In-product updates and user engagement surveys.

To enable these features for your institution's Blackboard users, toggle on User Engagement Surveys and Product Updates .

As certain new features are released, you can decide when to enable them for testing at your institution. You can give early access to your users to try out when it's least disruptive to courses and schedules.

Once a feature is ready for general availability, we'll remove its toggle from the Available Features list, and it'll be available to all users. We'll announce in future release notes when each feature toggle will be removed. For more information, visit Feature Toggles.