Release Notes 2018 | Blackboard Help

Release Notes for Learn SaaS - 2018

Cumulative Update 3 for FDO Q4 2018 (release 3500.0.3)

Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Experience

Cumulative Update (CU) 3 for the Q4 2018 Flexible Deployment Option (FDO) release of Blackboard Learn SaaS is available.

More information available on Behind the Blackboard

Batch edit due dates in course content

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.5.0 | Release to Production 6 December 2018
Ultra Course View

Building on the previous feature to batch edit visibility of course content, we’ve added the ability to adjust due dates in bulk.

Instructors often teach the same courses and curriculum each semester or year. When these courses use the same material, it can be challenging to update due dates for each item to reflect the new course calendar. In the Original Course View, this was achieved with Date Management. In this release, we bring that ability to Ultra.

With Batch Edit, you can update selected course content using a new course start date. Enter the new course start date and the existing start date. The tool calculates the difference between the two dates and uses the number of days to shift dates in all selected course content at once. You don’t have to spend time opening course content and determining new dates. Alternatively, you can shift all due dates backward or forward based on a chosen number of days.

Content without due dates isn't affected by batch editing dates.

Learn more about batch editing dates in the Ultra Course View

Content lockdown: Expanded user privileges for gradebook control

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.5.0 | Release to Production 6 December 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q2 2019
Ultra Course View, Original Course View

As part of an earlier release, we added entitlements for course roles so administrators can grant additional permissions for users that allow them to view course content but not modify it. In this release, we expand on those entitlements with respect to gradebook access and control.

Grading within a course is multi-faceted. Assigning a grade is only one piece of the process, which can also include grade maintenance, data download and upload, and release of grades. Institution administrators can grant some or all of these permissions to trusted facilitators to help ease the grading responsibility in larger courses.

Explore use cases for the facilitator role and privileges

Course Groups

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.5.0 | Release to Production 6 December 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors often need to organize students into groups. Previously, instructors created groups of students only in the context of assessments and discussions. This ability is useful and important, but it didn’t account for many other reasons why an instructor would want to create groups independent of assessments.

In this release, instructors can create groups and group sets at the course level, outside of assessments. Group sets help identify students who are paired together based on specific attributes or purposes.

In a future release, instructors will have the ability to apply course groups to graded content.

Learning modules and forced content sequence

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.5.0 | Release to Production 6 December 2018
Ultra Course View

This feature was initially expected to be part of 3500.5.0 and is now confirmed as part of 3500.5.0. In an earlier update, we incorrectly stated the feature had been delayed to a later release. We apologize for the confusion.

Learning modules are a valuable way to organize and present content in the Original Course View. Modules let content creators require students to access learning materials in a specified order, walking learners through a guided path. In this release, we bring the power of learning modules to the Ultra Course View.

Image of the Course Content page, with the Create menu open and the Learning Module option highlighted

Use learning modules to organize content for an immersive learning experience. Students can work on content in sequence without needing to close and open content items. Instructors can also enforce a content sequence so students access and complete content in the sequence specified.

Learning modules are available in new courses only. Courses created in a Learn environment prior to this release won’t have access to learning modules.

More on creating learning modules in Ultra

Maintenance items

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.5.0 | Release to Production 6 December 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q2 2019
Ultra Experience, Original Experience

You can view maintenance items in Behind the Blackboard. Our Known Issue articles provide information for individual bug fixes, and may include bug descriptions and which Learn versions were affected. You can filter bug fixes by SaaS release for easier navigation. View the 3500.5.0 maintenance issues on Behind the Blackboard.

Miscellaneous updates

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.5.0 | Release to Production 6 December 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q2 2019
Ultra Experience, Original Experience

The Consulting Central Building Block is bundled with this release. Learn more about Consulting Central on Behind the Blackboard.
The French language pack previously used an incorrect phrase to label new discussions. We’ve fixed the issue.
Users saw an error when downloading an annotated PDF with comments. We’ve fixed the issue so the downloads now include a summary list of comments.
To avoid permissions and grading issues, all LTI tools are excluded from the Copy Content option in the Ultra Course View.
When a student attempted to access an unavailable course in the Ultra experience, the date was recorded in the Performance Dashboard under “Last Course Access.” We’ve fixed the issue.
When a user attempted to access Organizations in the Ultra experience while using a touchscreen device, the page would display an error. We’ve fixed the issue.
When the Attendance tool was set to unavailable or inactive at the system level, instructors may have encountered error messages in the gradebook. We’ve fixed the issue.
Optional data wasn’t consistently included in Grade Journey extractions using REST. We’ve fixed the issue.
When an administrator attempted to move a user from one child course to another, the user enrollment wouldn’t change successfully. We’ve fixed the issue.
Students may have had trouble accessing the activity stream due to conflicting backend logic regarding grade columns and due dates. We’ve fixed the issue.
Special characters in custom Ultra locales weren’t displaying correctly. We’ve fixed the issue.
Course reports weren’t enforcing the date format for the system’s chosen language pack. We’ve fixed the issue.
Some devices displayed misaligned numbers for options in multiple choice, either/or, and true/false questions. We’ve fixed the issue.
The words points and score were sometimes used interchangeably in the Ultra Course View. We've updated the user interface to use points where it's more accurate.
Based on user feedback, we’ve updated the activity stream messages regarding student achievement and activity in courses. The new messages aim to reduce confusion and be more encouraging.
The Availability Override option didn’t work as expected when a start date wasn’t specified. We’ve fixed the issue so students with this privilege can access courses with or without a specified start date.
The service that connected cloud storage to Learn environments used a case-sensitive check to verify domain security. When domains used a mix of upper and lower case letters, the service couldn’t complete the request and resulted in incomplete attachments. We’ve fixed the issue.

New updates for Ally customers

Ally 1.23.1 | Release to Production 23 November 2018
New Features, Updated features

The latest release of Ally (v. 1.23.1) contains new features, bug fixes, and other improvements that may apply to your product. Visit the Ally release notes to learn more. Don't have Ally? Learn more about Ally.

New updates for Ally customers

Ally 1.23 | Release to Production 14 November 2018
New Features, Updated features

The latest release of Ally (v. 1.23) contains new features, bug fixes, and other improvements that may apply to your product. Visit the Ally release notes to learn more. Don't have Ally? Learn more about Ally.

Additional search criteria in Reuse Questions

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.3.0 | Release to Production 1 November 2018
Ultra Course View

On the Reuse Questions page, instructors can filter questions by more criteria. In addition to assessments and question banks that come over from the Original Course View, you can also filter by question types and Original Course View tags, such as categories. You can also search for keywords to find questions. The active filter area changes automatically as you select or clear criteria.

More on how to reuse questions in Ultra assessments

Reuse questions panel open highlighting all functions in the Filter panel

Advanced settings in SCORM

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.3.0 | Release to Production 1 November 2018
Ultra Course View

SCORM is a content standard that is used by some institutions, instructors, and instructional designers to author and present online learning materials and assessments to students.

In this release, we’ve added a number of enhancements to SCORM in the Ultra Course View:

Instructors can assign a grade category to SCORM packages.
Instructors can upload SCORM packages from the Content Collection.
SCORM due dates appear on the calendar and in the activity stream.
SCORM packages are supported in Ultra Course Preview and conversion from the Original Course View.

Ally integration available for the Ultra Course View

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.3.0 | Release to Production 1 November 2018
Ultra Course View

Starting with this release, Blackboard Ally integrates with the Ultra Course View. Ally provides detailed accessibility reports for content uploaded to Blackboard Learn. The integration is available to institutions who license Ally.

In the Ultra Course View, instructors have access to Ally’s accessibility scores and feedback, including tutorials on how to make common file types more accessible to learners of all abilities. Students can view and download course content in alternative accessible formats.

In a future release, we’ll show the file’s accessibility score on the Course Content page so instructors can quickly prioritize items to edit.

Get started with Blackboard Ally

Batch edit visibility of course content

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.3.0 | Release to Production 1 November 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors often reuse courses and content from one term to the next without major changes. At the start of a new term, instructors need a way to make these changes en masse. In this release, we introduce a new Batch Edit option on the Course Content page. Here, an instructor can select multiple pieces of content and edit visibility for each selected piece at the same time.

Along with this feature, instructors and course builders will notice that the Books & Tools link has moved to the Details & Actions menu. In a future release, instructors will also have the ability to adjust dates in course content using Batch Edit.

Learn how to use Batch Edit in a course

Calendar items and due date notifications for additional content types

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.3.0 | Release to Production 1 November 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q2 2019
Original Experience

The Calendar and To Do modules show the due dates of course items, but this was previously limited to activities and assessments using just Blackboard Learn tools. In this release, the capability is expanded so that other content types, including those from 3rd party solutions, are now incorporated into these Original Experience areas when using a web browser.

Users see these due items in their Course Calendar or My Blackboard Calendar, and due date notifications appear in the To Do module and through other notification subscription channels.

All of the following create calendar items and due notifications:

Assessment items such as assignments and tests
Interactive tools including graded discussions, blogs, journals, and wikis
Grade Center columns created manually and not linked to content items such as an observation or offline assignment
SCORM packages
Content items generated from building blocks when a linked Grade Center column has a due date
LTI resource links when a linked Grade Center column has a due date

Create percentage-based grading rubrics

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.3.0 | Release to Production 1 November 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors give very specific rubric scores with feedback when grading student submissions. A simple rubric with wide gaps between levels of achievement are insufficient for providing the granularity these institutions require. For example, two students may both meet the criteria for Sufficient for a given rubric row, but one student barely met the criteria while another almost did enough to be marked with the next highest level of achievement. With a normal rubric, these students would receive the same score. Instructors working under these requirements need to be able to mark both students as Sufficient, but provide more granular scoring within the range of scores associated with this rubric row.

In this release, we’ve expanded rubric criteria to include more granular levels of achievement, measured with percentages.

How to create rubrics with percentage ranges

This is how a percentage-based rubric details look like.

Data Integration Logs storage load reduced

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.3.0 | Release to Production 1 November 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q2 2019
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

We’ve improved the way that data integration logs store information in the shared file system. Searches in SIS logs are limited to seven-day date ranges to improve performance and reduce system strain.

Maintenance items

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.3.0 | Release to Production 1 November 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q2 2019
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

Miscellaneous updates

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.3.0 | Release to Production 1 November 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q2 2019
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

When versioned files are imported/restored as part of course import/restore, the version number (of the file in the source course) is appended at the end of the file name so that users can differentiate which version it is. For example, if version 1 and 2 of a file named "geography.html" are imported, the new files will be named "geography_v1.html" and "geography_v2.html", respectively.
A permissions issue in the Mobile Web Services building block caused tests to be inaccessible when first opened through the app. We fixed the issue.
An updated version of the Partner Cloud Building Block is bundled with this release.
An updated version of the Wiley Plus Building Block is bundled with this release.
An updated version of the Cengage Mindlinks Learning Building Block is bundled with this release.
An updated version of the Vital Source Building Block is bundled with this release. Grade syncing in the VitalSource Building Block is disabled by default in this release to prevent issues on the vendor's side.
Files uploaded as part of a SCORM package are now saved in a Content Collection folder (/internal/courses/<courseID>/content/<contentID>) rather than the Local/Shared File System. When a client system is upgraded to this release, a background migration task is invoked upon server startup to move all existing SCORM files from Local/Shared File System to Content Collection. Several optimizations have been added to minimize the performance impact and memory usage for this task and it should be virtually transparent for users.
Counts in the Ultra gradebook were confusing when some students were denied access in the course after participating in discussions or submitting assessments. We fixed the issue.
In the Original Course View, users designated as Observers were unable to view files added to the course through the Build Content > Add File workflow. We fixed the issue.
Attachments to course messages in the Original Course View resulted in the Tomcat temp directory disappearing, which led to other areas of Learn malfunctioning. We fixed the issue.
When an instructor attempted to grade a group assignment using a rubric and the language pack used commas to designate decimal places, the grade would display inconsistently. We fixed the issue.
In the Original Course View, pattern matching questions with incorrectly formatted regular expressions in the answer were marked wrong. We fixed the issue.
As part of an earlier improvement for content delivery in the Content Collection, we added the ability to disable certain MIME types in Learn. We expanded the list of default allowed MIME types.
Instructors encountered errors when grading a group discussion with a rubric. We fixed the issue.
We’ve fixed some issues in reports: All User Activity Inside Content Areas and Course Performance Report.
Clients using the Australian English language pack in Ultra encountered problems when creating calendar items. We fixed the issue.
Conversations on course content in the Ultra Course View were capped to the previous 10 replies, with no way to view earlier parts of the conversation. In this release, students and instructors can access earlier parts of the conversation.

SAML updates

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.3.0 | Release to Production 1 November 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q2 2019
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

We’ve enhanced the logout process for SAML single-sign on sessions. When a user logs out of Blackboard Learn, a message appears and asks them to confirm log out for all associated apps in the session. Previously, the SSO session persisted until it expired. Users can choose to terminate their entire SSO session when they log out of Blackboard Learn to protect their security when using public or shared computers.

Upload gradebook data in the Ultra Course View

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.3.0 | Release to Production 1 November 2018
Ultra Course View

In an earlier release, we introduced the ability for instructors to download gradebook data in the Ultra Course View. The counterpart to downloading grades is the ability to upload them, which is useful for instructors who prefer to work in an application like Excel and load student grade data into the LMS. In this release, instructors have the option to upload course gradebook data in Ultra.

Offline grading is a valuable and important enhancement. Instructors may prefer, or even require, that they are able to download the files students have submitted for an assessment. Limited WiFi access on a train, for example, shouldn’t impact the instructor’s ability to grade student submissions. In this scenario, the instructor can download the gradebook, enter the grades for the assessment, and then upload the grade data at a later time.

Learn how to upload grade data

Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018

The Blackboard Learn SaaS Q4 2018 (3500.0.0) release for Flexible Deployment Option customers will soon be available. Contact Blackboard Support to schedule your upgrade for the time and date that works best for you.

This release includes features released as part of continuous delivery releases since 3400.0.0. Use the category filter to narrow down the list of features in this latest release.

Cumulative Update 4 for FDO Q2 2018 (release 3400.0.4)

Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q2 2018
Original Experience

Cumulative Update (CU) 4 for the Q2 2018 Flexible Deployment Option (FDO) release of Blackboard Learn SaaS is available.

More information available on Behind the Blackboard

Expanded ability to reconcile grades in Delegated Grading

Blackboard Learn 9.1 Q4 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.0.0 | Release to Production 4 October 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Course View

Delegated grading lets an instructor share grading responsibilities by assigning course members to grade sets of submissions. Grading and feedback from more than one grader can promote reliability, improve consistency, and remove bias. The instructor can reconcile grades and settle on final scores after the graders have completed their assigned submissions.

The ability to reconcile grades was previously limited to instructors and users who were granted the permission by an administrator. In this release, instructors can grant this permission to graders. The Can reconcile grades option appears when the instructor delegates grading. Instructors can choose to grant the permission to any or all graders who are delegated submissions.

More on Delegated Grading in the Original Course View

Internet Explorer no longer supported

Blackboard Learn 9.1 Q4 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.0.0 | Release to Production 4 October 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Ultra Experience, Original Experience

Support for Internet Explorer ends with Blackboard Learn 9.1 Q4 2018 and SaaS 3500.0.0. Older releases may still work using this browser. Microsoft ended active development for Internet Explorer in January 2016. Some newer features in Learn may not work, including Attendance and Create Recording. Reported issues isolated to Internet Explorer won't be resolved by Product Support. We recommend using another browser.

Maintenance Items

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.0.0 | Release to Production 4 October 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

You can now view maintenance items in Behind the Blackboard. Our Known Issue articles provide information for individual bug fixes, and may include bug descriptions and which Learn versions were affected. You can filter bug fixes by SaaS release for easier navigation. View the 3500.0.0 maintenance issues on Behind the Blackboard.

Miscellaneous updates

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.0.0 | Release to Production 4 October 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

When a course was converted from Original to Ultra, instructors found they weren’t able to edit point values for assessments and questions that used decimal points in the number of possible points. We’ve fixed the issue by rounding point values down to the nearest whole number. This change is listed as an exception during the Ultra Course Preview.
Some users were unable to save drafts in discussion forum threads when using a language pack other than English. We’ve fixed the issue.
Placeholder text in the Ultra login page would sometimes obscure the username and password when the user input this information. We’ve fixed the issue.
Discussion descriptions in courses using the Learn 2016 theme were sometimes obscured or displayed with a limited width. We’ve fixed the issue.
Some users were unable to create criteria for Self and Peer Assessments when accessing the feature on Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer. We’ve fixed the issue.
When the Ultra experience is enabled, the Exit button overlapped the Add button in the Original Course View. We’ve fixed the issue.
We’ve rewritten an error message in Ultra to make acceptable date formats clearer.
When an instructor reversed the decision to ignore an attempt in the Original Course View, the message displayed on the screen was unclear and didn’t indicate the workflow. We’ve updated it to say Attempt marked as Not Ignored.
When users attempted to select all text in an Ultra assessment attempt, the browser didn’t select the text included in the attempt. We’ve fixed the issue.
When a user edited a test question in the Original Course View, some options in the text editor didn’t display correctly. We’ve fixed the issue.

Search the Ultra gradebook

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3500.0.0 | Release to Production 4 October 2018
Ultra Course View

Today’s courses, both online and mixed mode, can have large enrollments and volumes of course work. Instructors and other course facilitators may find it difficult to browse a gradebook in this type of course. In this release, we’ve introduced a search function in the Ultra gradebook to help users locate specific students when the list may be too long to browse.

To search for a student, open the Ultra gradebook in grid view. You can type the student’s name or student ID. Matching names appear below the search box. Select a student to filter your gradebook view and see their attempts and grades. In the future, we’ll continue development on this feature to include the ability to search for gradebook columns and categories.

Learn how to search for students in the Ultra gradebook

New updates for Ally customers

Ally 1.19.3 | Release to Production 9 September 2018
Updated features

The latest release of Ally (v. 1.19.3) contains bug fixes and other improvements that may apply to your product. Visit the Ally release notes to learn more. Don't have Ally? Learn more about Ally.

A special note from Product Management

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.11.0 | Release to Production 6 September 2018

We are developing our teaching and learning products toward the greater good of a holistic, next generation digital learning environment through the lens of three critical, unifying product themes: academic effectiveness, learner engagement, and education insight. By focusing on these themes, we will unify the development of our products to empower excellence in teaching and learning, inspire genuine interest, attention, and interaction in the learning process, and enable continuous improvement through accurate and deep understanding of the teaching and learning process.

In the Learn SaaS 3400.11.0 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness and learner engagement. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list into groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Academic effectiveness

Download annotated PDFs
Anonymous grading in Ultra Course View
Unsubmitted work counts as zero

Learner engagement

Download annotated PDFs
Improvements for course messages

Anonymous grading

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.11.0 | Release to Production 6 September 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors need a way to ensure the anonymity of students (hiding personally identifying information) to avoid bias when grading. Some regions mandate anonymity for high-stakes assessment.

To support this, we developed an enforceable means to anonymize student information to instructors and other reviewers. After grading is complete, the information can be revealed. Student identities remain hidden until all grades are posted, at which point names are revealed.

The Gradebook page is open and the anonymous grading process is displayed. The step-by-step shows how the instructor can access the rubric, open student files, annotate inline, and assign a grade and feedback.

Learn more about anonymous grading in Ultra

Content delivery improvements

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.11.0 | Release to Production 6 September 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

Multimedia is essential in many mixed-mode and online courses, and poor performance can lead to a frustrating user experience. To help speed the delivery of online media, such as video, we’ve added configuration options for administrators to control content delivery through signed URLs. Signed URLs allow content to be delivered directly and securely from cloud storage, which provides faster transfers and requires fewer resources to run on the system. A signed URL is equivalent to the actual file after it’s delivered to the browser.

Find the settings on Administrator Panel > Content Management Settings > Cloud Signed URL Settings.

Learn more about content delivery improvements

Download annotated PDFs

Blackboard Learn 9.1 Q4 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.11.0 | Release to Production 6 September 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Course View, Ultra Course View

This feature was also available for Self- and Managed-Hosting environments as a Cumulative Update for Blackboard Learn 9.1.

Users were accustomed to downloading annotated files when Crocodoc handled inline file rendering. With the switch to New Box View, this capability wasn’t available and highly requested. Blackboard listened and developed the ability to download annotated files using the New Box View.

In this release, both instructors and students can download certain file types (DOC, DOCX, PDF) with annotations as an annotated PDF. Students can download the annotated file after their submission has been graded.

Visit Inline Grading and New Box View Update on the Blackboard Community for more information and a video demonstration

Check out the October 2018 Inline Grading and New Box View Update for an update about comment summaries in annotated PDFs

Learn more about downloading annotated PDFs in New Box View

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) User Report

One of the requirements of the European Union (EU) GDPR is to allow users to receive human-readable reports of personal information that has been collected about them. Clients receiving user requests may submit a case on Behind the Blackboard, including the user’s ID, to request the exported report package. The report is a ZIP file that contains CSV files with site- and course-level information about user activity, tool interactions, uploaded content, or submitted work within Blackboard Learn. Any grade data in the report are raw values and don’t include any calculations or weighting the instructor may have applied in the Grade Center. The report won’t contain information about other users in the system, content created by the institution or other users, or information from deleted courses.

Flexible Deployment Option customers: In Q4 2018 CU1 (3500.0.1), the GDPR User Report includes Activity Log and Attendance data.

Improvements for course messages

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.11.0 | Release to Production 6 September 2018
Ultra Experience

We’ve updated the global and course messages pages for more intuitive and easy navigation. You’ll notice the following changes:

On the global Messages page in the base navigation, courses are grouped according to term, similar to the way they are grouped on the Courses page. Your current courses appear first when you open the Messages page. You can use the arrows to navigate through the groups.
The number of messages you've received in each course is displayed with a course card. Select the course card to jump to all of your messages.
In your course, you can select the number of messages that appear per page.
When you select a course message to view, you can use arrows to browse through messages in order.

Learn more about improvements to course messages

Maintenance Items

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.11.0 | Release to Production 6 September 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

You can now view maintenance items in Behind the Blackboard. Our Known Issue articles provide information for individual bug fixes, and may include bug descriptions and which Learn versions were affected. You can filter bug fixes by SaaS release for easier navigation. View the 3400.11.0 maintenance issues on Behind the Blackboard.

Miscellaneous updates

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.11.0 | Release to Production 6 September 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

In the Original experience, administrators had no option in the user interface to remove images they had added to a default brand. This issue was fixed.
Some institutions who customized the default landing page in the Ultra experience noticed some inconsistent behavior for the destination when users logged in. This issue was fixed.
Some custom administrator roles were unable to access courses delivered in the Ultra Course View. This issue was fixed.
Attachments to course messages caused unnecessary file backups that could lead to system performance issues. This issue was fixed.
In the Ultra experience, default course view settings would sometimes reset on system restart or upgrade. This issue has been fixed.
Some instructors who used percentage-based rubrics to grade assignments noticed that mid-range values would revert on save. This issue was fixed.
For environments with automatic course archive enabled, some files older than 45 days weren’t included in course backup files. This issue was fixed.
We’ve updated the text shown to administrators who choose to use the Ultra experience on Test environments. The message now states more clearly that the environment will need to be completely rebuilt and all data will be lost to convert back to the Original experience.
We’ve updated the text shown to users when content controlled with conditional release is unavailable. When a student hovers on the content after access is over, the message now reads: You can't access this content after MM/DD/YYYY, 00:00AM. Previously, the message only stated when the content became available, not when access ended.

Unsubmitted work counts as zero

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.11.0 | Release to Production 6 September 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors may want to set up the gradebook so that unsubmitted, past-due work is automatically marked as zero. For larger courses, it can be burdensome and time-consuming to grade these missing submissions as zeros manually.

This release includes a global gradebook setting to allow instructors to assign automatic zeros to missing work past the due date. Instructors can save the time it takes to go through the gradebook to manually enter zeros for this work. Students can still submit work after an automatic zero is assigned and instructors can grade as normal.

The Automatic Zero option is enabled by default in all new Ultra courses.

Learn more about automatic zeros for unsubmitted work in Ultra

Upload an image to the Institution Page

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.11.0 | Release to Production 6 September 2018
Ultra Experience

On the Institution Page, administrators can upload a picture hosted in the Content Collection. Previously, images used for the institution logo or banner were added with a URL. Institutions who host the images with other institution content needed to take an additional step to locate the file path. Starting with the release, administrators can open and browse the Content Collection to use these images on the Institution Page.

Images can also be added to the Helpful Links module in this way. When the administrator adds an image from the Content Collection, the permissions for the image file update to include any user who’s able to view the module.

Learn more about uploading images to the Institution Page

Cumulative Update 3 for FDO Q2 2018 (release 3400.0.3)

Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q2 2018
Original Experience

Cumulative Update (CU) 3 for the Q2 2018 Flexible Deployment Option (FDO) release of Blackboard Learn SaaS is available.

More information available on Behind the Blackboard

A special note from Product Management

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.9.0 | Release to Production 2 August 2018

In the Learn SaaS 3400.9.0 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness and learner engagement. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list into groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Academic effectiveness

SCORM support in Ultra
Download gradebook
Custom locales in Ultra

Learner engagement

Group creation & grading enhancements
Course list optimization
Conversation improvements
Add LTI links to the Institution Page

Add LTI links to the Institution Page

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.9.0 | Release to Production 2 August 2018
Ultra Experience

In this release, we bring the LTI standard to the Institution Page. Schools can now surface LTI tools outside of the course context for all their users or a select subset of users based on institution role.

To add an LTI item to the Institution Page, create a Custom Content module. Select Insert/Edit LTI Item in the editor and browse for system tools available in the system. LTI tools appear in the editor with the provider’s icon, but you can change the display text.

Conversation improvements

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.9.0 | Release to Production 2 August 2018
Ultra Course View

Conversations on course content items have been improved in the following ways:

The Conversations panel has been increased to full-width.
Students can now respond and reply to each other in conversations the same as they do in discussions.
We’ve added activity indicators for new conversation posts.
A student or instructor can see all conversation participants.
A student or instructor can search all conversation participants.

More on conversations regarding Ultra course content

Course list optimization

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.9.0 | Release to Production 2 August 2018
Ultra Experience

In an earlier release, we improved the Courses page in the Ultra experience to better course terms and let institutions display courses in a way that aligns to the student journey. With this release, we will continue to refine the page as we allow for more user choice and improve the layout of the page overall. These changes include:

Addition of a quick drop down for quick past-term navigation
Original Course View label added to all Original courses
Original courses descriptions are now available from the expanded course card view
Term sub-listings are now displayed on the current courses page to let users scan quickly

More on how terms affect the Courses page in the Ultra experience

Custom locales in Ultra

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.9.0 | Release to Production 2 August 2018
Ultra Experience

Previously, Learn Ultra supported predetermined language packs without the ability to customize. This release introduces custom locale capabilities that will allow an institution to change specific words or phrases within their site and not have it break with each monthly update.

With multitudes of dialects comprising the world’s many languages, Blackboard understands how many varieties and nuances of languages exist. The adjustments you make to your locale end up making a huge difference in the lives of educators and learners and it is one less barrier to overcome when digesting the material being taught.

Ultra locales only contain strings in the Ultra Experience and Ultra Course View user interfaces. To edit strings that appear in the Original Experience or Original Course View, see Create and Edit Language Packs for the Original Experience.

Download gradebook

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.9.0 | Release to Production 2 August 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors sometimes find the gradebook insufficient for doing statistical analysis or other ad hoc computational work with student grades. These instructors prefer to download the raw student and grade data and manipulate it in an application like Microsoft Excel.

In this release, instructors can download grade data within their Ultra courses. Instructors can select to download the entire gradebook or select columns, choose to export in a .CSV or .XLS format, and save it to the device or the Content Collection for future access. Uploading gradebook data is not yet available but in development for future release.

More on how to download gradebook data in Ultra

Group creation & grading improvements

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.9.0 | Release to Production 2 August 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors may require the ability to edit groups after they’ve released a group discussion, assignment, or test for students. Previously, instructors didn’t have the option to modify groups at all after students started drafting submissions. However, the ability to make small changes is sometimes necessary to provide minimal disruption for all course members.

To help support instructors in these situations, we’ve added the following enhancements to group assessments:

New empty state page lets instructors create as few or as many groups as they’d like from the beginning.
Instructors can edit group names after students begin attempts.
New Unassign All option appears when creating groups.
Instructors can edit group membership if a given group hasn’t started working or existing attempts are removed.

More on how instructors create an Ultra group assignment

Maintenance Items

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.9.0 | Release to Production 2 August 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

You can now view maintenance items in Behind the Blackboard. Our Known Issue articles provide information for individual bug fixes, and may include bug descriptions and which Learn versions were affected. You can filter bug fixes by SaaS release for easier navigation. View the 3400.9.0 maintenance issues on Behind the Blackboard.

Miscellaneous updates

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.9.0 | Release to Production 2 August 2018
Ultra Experience, Original Experience

We've updated text regarding external submissions in the Ultra Course View. The assessment setting now says Collect submissions offline, and students see a message that says Offline submission when accessing assessments of this type.
Instructors encountered an error in graded discussion boards converted from the Original Course View to the Ultra Course View. The error appeared when the instructor tried to change the grade schema. This issue was fixed.
Recipients were unable to download message attachments that contained special characters in the file name. This issue was fixed.
Instructors may have encountered an error when attempting to delete submissions that contained attachments. This issue was fixed.
Course members may have experienced issues opening and viewing discussion boards where a deactivated user had once participated. This issue was fixed.
Messages in the Ultra Course View sometimes showed the incorrect sender and recipient names. This issue was fixed.
Administrators may have seen an error regarding permissions when attempting to download an attachment on a student submission. This issue was fixed.
Users who change their language setting can see system announcements that were posted before changing the setting.
In the Original Course View, some users had to refresh the page to see their reply to a discussion forum. This issue was fixed.
In the Original Course View, some users were unable to remove file attachments in draft discussion posts. This issue was fixed.
Instructors may have observed unexpected characters in the Due Date column of the Ultra gradebook when the assignment had no due date assigned. This issue was fixed.

SCORM support in Ultra

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.9.0 | Release to Production 2 August 2018
Ultra Course View

SCORM is a content standard that is used by some institutions, instructors, and instructional designers to author and present online learning materials and assessments to students. In this release, we’re adding support for selecting, adding, presenting, and using SCORM content in Ultra courses.

Instructors can import SCORM packages into an Ultra course and select grading options for the package as a whole or each content item individually.

New updates for Ally customers

Continuous Delivery Ally 1.17 | Release to Production 2 August 2018
New features

The latest release of Ally (v. 1.17) contains bug fixes and other improvements that may apply to your product. Visit the Ally release notes to learn more. Don't have Ally? Learn more about Ally.

Mobile Web Services

Blackboard Learn 9.1
Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery
Original Experience, Ultra Experience, Building Blocks

The Blackboard Mobile Web Services Building Block enables users to connect to their courses through Blackboard's mobile applications: Blackboard app and Blackboard Instructor. The latest version of the Mobile Web Services Building Block is 94.9.12. Check these links for the best available version for your installation.

Mobile Web Services release notes for all versions

A special note from Product Management

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.7.0 | Release to Production 5 July 2018

In the Learn SaaS 3400.7.0 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness and learner engagement. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list into groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Academic effectiveness

Reuse questions
Matching questions

Learner engagement

Matching questions
Course announcements

Announcements in the Ultra Course View

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.7.0 | Release to Production 5 July 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors often want to post information for students in a certain course. Rather than sending a message that can easily be dismissed or left unread, instructors may prefer to post an announcement that every course member sees when opening the course. Instructors can draft, schedule, and post course announcements in the Ultra Course View in this release.

Announcements are a high-profile way to communicate a message as it relates to the course environment. Instructors can communicate schedule changes, upcoming exams, or anything else the students should pay attention to. Students can access the announcement archive to double-check any of the information you’ve posted. You can also schedule announcements for the future.

More on how instructors can create a course announcement in Ultra

Cloud storage integration in the Original Course View

Blackboard Learn 9.1 Q4 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.7.0 | Release to Production 5 July 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Course View

Blackboard is pleased to announce cloud storage integration in the Original Course View. Instructors and students can access an aggregated cloud service that lets users connect to their preferred cloud storage accounts and place content directly into their course. Instructors and students can instantly connect to multiple web apps where they store files.

Your files are stored on secure, online servers where they're protected from accidents and viruses. If something happens to your computer or phone, you don't have to worry about file loss. You can access your files in the cloud any time you're connected to the internet, on any of your devices.

This feature was also made available with Blackboard Learn 9.1 Q2 2018 CU4.

Get started with the cloud storage integration

Maintenance Items

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.7.0 | Release to Production 5 July 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

You can now view maintenance items in Behind the Blackboard. Our Known Issue articles provide information for individual bug fixes, and may include bug descriptions and which Learn versions were affected. You can filter bug fixes by SaaS release for easier navigation. View the 3400.7.0 maintenance issues on Behind the Blackboard.

Matching questions

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.7.0 | Release to Production 5 July 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors need flexibility in how they evaluate a student's mastery of a concept. Matching is a common question type instructors use in assessments where students are shown two sets of options and asked to associate options from the first set with the correct option in the second set. Matching questions are a popular question type in the Original Course View. In this release, we’ve brought the same capability to the Ultra Course View.

Instructors have many options when creating a matching question in Ultra. There can be more answers than prompts to prevent students from answering by a process of elimination. Additionally, instructors can grade matching questions with partial credit, all or nothing, subtract points for incorrect answers, and even allow negative scoring to discourage guessing.

More on matching questions in the Ultra Course View

View of a student selecting an image to answer a matching question.

Miscellaneous updates

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.7.0 | Release to Production 5 July 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

In the Ultra Course View, the Add Content icon is now a darker shade and heavier weight to provide greater contrast with the surrounding elements in the user interface.
When setting up SMS notifications in Ultra, users now see a message reminding them that their cellular carrier may charge a fee for these messages.
The SafeAssign Originality Report is disabled for assessments set to collect external submissions.
An updated version of the Cengage Building Block (v1.101.20182347) is bundled with this release.
Some students may have had trouble accessing a group assignment if a group member was disabled from accessing the course. This issue has been resolved.
Lengthy videos displayed through the New Box View service were stopping before reaching the end of playback. The vendor has fixed this issue.

Localization updates

The German translation for Open to Students in the Ultra Course View has been improved.
The word “goals” was inconsistently translated in the Spanish language pack for the Ultra experience. This issue has been resolved.

Reuse questions in an Ultra assessment

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.7.0 | Release to Production 5 July 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors invest a lot of time and effort crafting questions for assessments. A test or assignment may be created for a specific purpose, but the questions within may be repurposed for a unit test or a final exam. To support instructors who create assessments in this way, we’re introducing the ability to reuse questions in a course.

In this release, instructors can reuse questions from any other assessment within an Ultra course. Select Reuse questions within an assignment or test to get started. Filter questions by assessment or view all available questions to copy. When browsing questions to reuse, instructors can quickly view what type of question it is, as well as the content.

Selected questions are copied into the assessment, so any edits to the original question won’t carry over to other places it appears.

New updates for Ally customers

Continuous Delivery Ally 1.16.5 | Release to Production 2 July 2018
Updated features

The latest release of Ally (v. 1.16.5) contains bug fixes and other improvements that may apply to your product. Visit the Ally release notes to learn more. Don't have Ally? Learn more about Ally.

Educator Preview is now the new CourseSites!

Release to Production 27 June 2018

Educator Preview is now the new CourseSites. The learning environment will still serve as the premier place to test drive the Ultra experience, with the added bonus of having a course delivery option for you to teach live courses using either the Ultra Course View or the Original Course View. Check out the new CourseSites and visit the CourseSites Community for more information.

A special note from Product Management

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.5.0 | Release to Production 31 May 2018

In the Learn SaaS 3400.5.0 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness and learner engagement. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list into groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Academic effectiveness

Discussion Analysis
External submissions
Additional cloud storage providers

Learner engagement

Improvements to user privacy
Announcements on the Ultra login page
Insert recordings using the editor in assessment feedback

Announcements on the Ultra login page

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.5.0 | Release to Production 31 May 2018
Ultra Experience

Institutions sometimes want to communicate messages to users in a prominent place, possibly even before users log in to the system. Prior to this release, announcements could be placed on the login page only in the Original experience. Now, we bring the same functionality to Ultra.

Administrators can create and place announcements on the login page the same way for both experiences. Go to Admin Panel > Announcements > Create Announcement to get started. Set Show at Login to Yes to have your announcement appear to unauthenticated users.

Collect submissions offline and grade with rubrics

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.5.0 | Release to Production 31 May 2018
Ultra Course View

Sometimes an instructor wants to create a rubric to assess a student's performance in an offline or non-Ultra course context. For example, if a student is being assessed for a public speaking project, the instructor may want to convey instructions or the rubric preview to the student to prepare them for this offline assessment but won't expect to collect the submissions through the course.

In this release, we're introducing a new assessment setting to allow users to track offline submissions and use a rubric to grade. This feature helps bridge the gap for hybrid courses that meet in person and conduct course activities online. Instructors can keep track of all relevant coursework within Ultra and eliminate the need to transcribe grades from items or activities that took place physically.

The Assignment page is open with 1) the Assignment settings panel on screen and 2) the "Collect submissions offline" option clicked and highlighted.

More on collecting submissions offline in Ultra

Configure static resources

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.5.0 | Release to Production 31 May 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

Starting with this release, you can specify a desired directory in the Content Collection. To access this setting, go to Admin Panel > System Configuration > Configure Static Resources. Blackboard Learn ships with this set to an internal default directory, but you can change that to any location of your choice. Files in the chosen location are served by the Learn application server as if they were located at the server root, allowing the server to serve static files such as robots.txt and favicon.ico. Before this improvement, this functionality required custom workarounds.

This feature is intended solely for files such as those listed; it is not intended for serving dynamic content or large files.

More on system configuration in Blackboard Learn SaaS

Connect additional cloud storage services

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.5.0 | Release to Production 31 May 2018
Ultra Course View

Using cloud storage in the Ultra Course View, instructors and students can instantly connect to multiple web apps where you store files. Your files are stored on secure, online servers where they're protected from accidents and viruses. If something happens to your computer or phone, you don't have to worry about file loss. You can access your files in the cloud any time you're connected to the internet, on any of your devices.

In this release, we're expanding the cloud services you can connect to in your course. Add content directly from your OneDrive for Business, Dropbox, or Google Drive accounts to your Ultra course. In an earlier release, we included the ability to connect to Box and personal OneDrive accounts.

We added the ability to add files from cloud storage for the Original Course View in Blackboard Learn SaaS release v3400.7.0.

More on how instructors add content from cloud storage

Speed up grading with Discussion Analysis

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.5.0 | Release to Production 31 May 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors use graded discussions to encourage thoughtful and relevant conversation related to a given topic. The act of grading is already a time-consuming process that can be exaggerated in the context of discussions. A student's discussion participation grade can be based on many qualitative factors that aren't easy or quick to evaluate but deserve in-depth analysis.

We're happy to announce a new feature in graded discussions to help assist instructors determine complexity and engagement for each student. The new Discussion Analysis feature displays key metrics such as critical thinking, sentence complexity, responses, replies, and average word count. The critical thinking metric is analyzed using a Blackboard-developed algorithm, while sentence complexity uses Flesch-Kincaid readability benchmarks.

Improvements to User Privacy in accordance with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

Blackboard Learn 9.1 Q4 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.5.0 | Release to Production 31 May 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q2 2018 CU1 (3400.0.1), Q4 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

Blackboard is committed to protecting the privacy of all users. Due to changing regulations globally concerning use of data and privacy, including the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), this release includes updates that impact user experience. Administrators should evaluate the impact this may have for their users.

On the login page, we've added links to access the Blackboard privacy and data use statement, the Blackboard terms of use, and an optional privacy and data use statement from the institution have been added to the login page. In the Original experience, the links also appear in the login module and the settings area of My Blackboard. In the Blackboard and Blackboard Instructor mobile apps, the links are found in Settings and in the Terms of Use shown at login. This way, users can access important information about the use of their data and their privacy both before and after authentication.
The Security Management: Cookie Disclosure Building Block, originally intended to address regulations in the European Privacy Data Directive, has been replaced by the Security Management: Data Use and Privacy Disclosure Building Block. This Building Block is part of the core system and can't be disabled or removed.
For institutions that don't have users who would fall under regulations requiring this acceptance, the terms acceptance interface can be disabled in the Security Management: Data Use and Privacy Disclosure settings page. However, we recommend institutions keep the acceptance interface enabled because some users might access from another location with such regulations.
The Security Management: Data Use and Privacy Disclosure settings page allows an administrator to define a web link to institutional statements about data use and privacy. An administrator could also store such a statement in the Content Collection as a public file and link to it.

More on the Security Management - Data Use and Privacy Disclosure Building Block

Insert recordings using the editor in assessment feedback

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.5.0 | Release to Production 31 May 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors providing students with feedback, whether for in-person or distance education, is a critical aspect of the pedagogical process. It is also challenging to engage learners in non-face-to-face settings, thus increasing the importance of audio communication media. The ability to embed video/audio communication into a course provides a simple way for users to provide feedback.

Instructors can record video and audio using the editor in assessment feedback. When paired with text-based feedback, video and audio messages can help provide students with useful, actionable, and more personal feedback regarding their submissions.

This feature is controlled by a service that is independent of Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery releases. The feature became available on June 12th for Continuous Delivery environments in the United States (additional regional available will be added over time).

Maintenance Items

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.5.0 | Release to Production 31 May 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

You can now view maintenance items in Behind the Blackboard. Our Known Issue articles provide information for individual bug fixes, and may include bug descriptions and which Learn versions were affected. You can filter bug fixes by SaaS release for easier navigation. View the 3400.5.0 maintenance issues on Behind the Blackboard.

Miscellaneous updates

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.5.0 | Release to Production 31 May 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

Ultra Experience and Ultra Course View

We've updated the scoring options for multiple choice questions so they are shorter and easy to scan:
- All or nothing: All correct answers must be selected to receive full credit
- Partial credit: Give credit for correct answers with no penalty for incorrect answers
- Subtract points for incorrect answers: Give credit for correct answers, but subtract points for incorrect answers. The question score can total less than 0.
When accessing the course catalog as a guest in Ultra, the user wasn't always able to return to the login page from within a course. This issue has been resolved.
The Maximum Score field in Ultra assessments now displays an error message when a user attempts to input a negative number
We fixed a bug that incorrectly displayed the number of students with accommodations in a discussion
When more than one instructor was enrolled in a course, these users were assigned to groups in group discussions in the Ultra Course View. This issue has been resolved.
Students may have seen an error message when attempting to view grades in a course where a graded discussion was available at a certain date and time. This issue has been resolved.
The Ultra course roster was including disabled enrollments in the overall count of course members. This issue has been resolved.
The link to chat with Support in Educator Preview was updated to a new destination

Original Experience and Original Course View

We've fixed an error that appeared when an instructor attempted to create an assignment using a Portfolio template in the Original Course View
The number of points possible for an assessment in the Original Course View was inconsistent when a rubric was applied. This issue has been resolved.
When students uploaded multiple attachments to Self and Peer Assessments, only the first attachment was displayed. This issue has been resolved.
On the Goal Performance page, the overall progress for a goal was incorrectly aggregating the performance on aligned course items. This issue has been resolved.

General

Some institution announcements may have disappeared after upgrading from Managed Hosting to SaaS. This issue has been resolved.
SafeAssign sporadically failed to generate Originality Reports for assignments. This issue has been resolved.
An error occurred when attempting to create a new system role in Blackboard Learn. This issue has been resolved.

Localization updates

Placeholder text in fill in the blank questions wasn't properly localized. This issue has been resolved.
Fields in the attendance report for instructors weren't properly localized. This issue has been resolved.
Users who selected Swedish as their default language in Ultra saw untranslated strings when viewing events on the base calendar. This issue has been resolved.

New updates for Ally customers

Continuous Delivery Ally 1.16.2 | Release to Production 23 May 2018
New features, Updated features

The latest release of Ally (v. 1.16.2) contains bug fixes and other improvements that may apply to your product. Visit the Ally 1.16.2 release notes to learn more. Don't have Ally? Learn more about Ally.

Cumulative Update 1 for FDO Q2 2018 (release 3400.0.1)

Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q2 2018
Original Experience

Cumulative Update (CU) 1 for the Q2 2018 Flexible Deployment Option (FDO) release of Blackboard Learn SaaS is available.

More information available on Behind the Blackboard

Accommodations for timed assessments

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.3.0 | Release to Production 4 May 2018
Ultra Course View

Accommodations allow instructors to mark certain students exempt from high pressure aspects of a course, such as due dates. Accommodations can help students complete coursework and succeed where they might otherwise be at a disadvantage.

In this release, we're introducing the ability to accommodate students for timed assessments. From the roster, an instructor can allow chosen students extra time on a timed test or assignment or exempt them from the time limit completely. A student with the Unlimited Time accommodation never sees the time limit for the assessment, reducing the pressure or anxiety that comes with coursework.

Activity indicators for active Collaborate rooms

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.3.0 | Release to Production 4 May 2018
Ultra Course View

Distance courses hold virtual meetings to foster communication and reinforce engagement among course members. Without a pre-established meeting time, a student or other course member may not know when others are engaged in the Collaborate session. With this release, we’ve made it easy to see when virtual meetings—for the entire course or among assessment groups—are taking place.

When a course Collaborate room is in session, an indicator appears on the Course Content page to let others know the room is in use. The same icon appears in group assessments when the instructor has enabled conversations and another group member is in the room.

This feature is a subtle but impactful enhancement around user presence in a course.

More on joining a Collaborate session from Blackboard Learn

Add web content in the editor

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.3.0 | Release to Production 4 May 2018
Ultra Course View

Today, in the Original experience, content creators can add links and embedded content from a variety of external content sources from the Rich Text Editor. Instructors need to be able to discover any content from the spot where they’d like to place it. Instructors often use content from outside sources in courses rather than building all of their course materials from scratch.

To support these instructors, we've introduced the ability to add web content directly in the editor. This ability was previously restricted to direct links to videos or images. In the first phase of the Insert Web Content feature, we've added the ability to browse and search YouTube for videos. Instructors don't have to leave their course to find a relevant video. We're adding more content providers in this menu over the forthcoming releases.

More on how to add web content in the editor

Auto-archive courses

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.3.0 | Release to Production 4 May 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

Blackboard is introducing a new feature that automatically archives active courses on Blackboard Learn SaaS client sites. Auto-archive is an automated process that archives any course that has had activity since the last time the process ran. Archives are stored in the Content Collection where administrators can view, restore, and download the archives as needed.

Archives created automatically are deleted after 30 days.

Using this tool, an administrator can restore an archive of an existing course if the owner has damaged the course. Administrators can also restore previous versions of a course (within 30 days) if the owner needs to compare the current version to an earlier version of the course.

This feature is being introduced to client sites incrementally, so you may not see it available on your system even though the 3400.3.0 release is available.

Learn more about archiving courses in Blackboard Learn SaaS

Cloud storage integration

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.3.0 | Release to Production 4 May 2018
Ultra Course View

Blackboard is pleased to announce additional cloud storage integration providers available in the Ultra Course View. With this release, instructors and students have access to an aggregated cloud service that lets users connect to their preferred cloud storage accounts and place content directly into their course. In the Ultra Course View, instructors and students can instantly connect to multiple web apps where you store files.

This integration is happening from a few different places in Ultra:

Within ‘add content’ workflows in the Course Content page,
In assessment creation and submission workflows, and
In the editor

This service is being introduced over multiple releases and won’t be available in all regions simultaneously.

In 3400.3.0, the first services available are Box and OneDrive (personal accounts only)
Remaining services, such as Google Drive, will be introduced in 3400.5.0
Regional availability begins with the United States
Additional regions will be added over time and may be independent of release cadence
Availability in the Original Experience and Original Course View is forthcoming

Cloud storage integration is available in Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery environments, but isn't compatible with the generally available version of 9.1 Q2 2018 (build 3400.0) or SaaS Q2 2018 Flexible Deployment Option release. A Cumulative Update will be required to enable the feature in these environments.

Get started with the cloud storage integration

Content lockdown

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.3.0 | Release to Production 4 May 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

Many institutions use Subject Matter Experts to create content for a course. This content is used across all sections of a course and is facilitated by multiple faculty. To ensure that the content in each course section remains consistent, we’ve added new entitlements for course roles so administrators can grant additional permissions for users that will allow them to view the content but they will not be able to modify the content.

In the coming releases, we’ll introduce even more granular entitlements like these with the goal of ultimately providing a formal Facilitator role that you can enable and designate for chosen users. You’ll find the following permissions are now available:

Course/Organization (Content Areas) > Adaptive Release > Create Date-Based Criteria
Course/Organization (Content Areas) > Adaptive Release > Delete Date-Based Criteria
Course/Organization (Content Areas) > Adaptive Release > Edit Date-Based Criteria
Course/Organization (Content Areas) > Edit Material Availability
Course/Organization Control Panel (Grade Center) > Change Due Date of Grade Center Items

More on course roles in Blackboard Learn SaaS

Course list optimization

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.3.0 | Release to Production 4 May 2018
Ultra Experience

The Courses page in Ultra is a simple, quick way to access all of your courses, including those in the past or in the future. But is it really that simple if you're enrolled in a lot of courses?

In this release, we've enhanced the Courses page to work for instructors and students who are enrolled in a small or large number of courses. Improvements include:

A new search bar lets a user quickly find one key course without scrolling through all of their courses.
Course cards now occupy the full width of the list so you can easily read the full course name, instructors, and other key information.
The Courses page now include pagination for longer lists to improve load speeds and prevent information overload.
Users can now add courses to a Favorites list for quick access. Favorite courses appear at the top of the course list.
Courses in the Original Course View appear with a grey course card. Ultra course cards contain colors.

Explore the courses page from the instructor perspective

Discussion Forum Insights for group discussions

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.3.0 | Release to Production 4 May 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors want to understand the contribution, or lack of contribution, of students in a group discussion to encourage participation. To support this need, we’re pleased to share that discussion forum insights is now available for group discussions.

With discussion forum insight for group discussions, instructors can determine how effective their discussion was in soliciting class participation and engagement, the top student contributors, as well as the overall class activity. Reports clearly show the number of participants, the percentage of students who have participated so far, the average number of comments per student, the average word count of student comments, and the average grade for the class if it's a graded discussion. Discussion insights also highlights the top five participants in the discussion and allows you to drill down into their comments and replies for more context.

Instructors can view information for both the overall discussion and each assigned group. Insights include how many students have opened the discussion, how many students have posted, and the average number of posts for each group member.

Institution Page – Role-based modules

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.3.0 | Release to Production 4 May 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

Institutions publish and share lots of information for different audiences. While all users may need access to the help desk, for example, the contact information for students and faculty may be different.

Modules on the Institution Page can now be displayed to selected user groups. By reducing the amount of information that doesn't affect a user, administrators can help maximize the available real estate on the Institution Page and help prevent confusion for all users.

Learn Data Pipeline Upgrade

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.3.0 | Release to Production 4 May 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

Blackboard is upgrading the data management process for Blackboard Learn clients with Direct Data Access (DDA). This change applies to Blackboard Learn SaaS Advantage customer institutions using DDA. Blackboard is migrating SaaS reporting data to a new state-of-the-art Snowflake database. After the migration is complete, clients will have access to a new data microservice for Blackboard Learn. You can get the same data that supports Learn's built-in reporting using the new microservice.

This change is being introduced to client sites incrementally, so you may not see it available on your system even though the 3400.3.0 release is available. Full documentation, including credential requests, user interface access, and affected Building Blocks, will be available soon.

Maintenance Items

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.3.0 | Release to Production 4 May 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

You can now view maintenance items in Behind the Blackboard. Our Known Issue articles provide information for individual bug fixes, and may include bug descriptions and which Learn versions were affected. You can filter bug fixes by SaaS release for easier navigation. View the 3400.3.0 maintenance issues on Behind the Blackboard.

Miscellaneous updates

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.3.0 | Release to Production 4 May 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

We've updated a message in the mobile view of the Ultra Course Preview to be more consistent with the experience on desktop. Both platforms now show the user the following message:
If you like the preview, you can permanently convert your course and save any changes you've made during the Ultra Course Preview. If you switch back to Original Course View, changes made during preview are lost.
We've updated text for students beginning assessments without time limits in the Ultra Course View. When a student opens an assignment or a test without a time limit, the button says View assessment instead of Start attempt. This language more clearly communicates that the student is not compelled to submit the attempt after opening it if it isn't timed.
We've improved the user experience in the new editor. Previously, when a user wanted to remove a hyperlink from a piece of text, they would need to delete the text entirely. Now, a user can simply remove the hyperlink without affecting their content.
In both Ultra and Original courses, when instructors first access the attendance feature, they’re able to select Add Attendance and add an attendance column after attendance records are generated. In the Ultra Course View gradebook, instructors can delete attendance if no attendance records exist.
Administrator preview for a system notification in the Ultra experience previously cut off long pieces of text. The preview now wraps text and this issues has been resolved.
The SafeHTML filter now applies to additional files types in Blackboard Learn.
Course content wasn't appearing as expected when a course bound to a term was archived and restored in a system that did not have the equivalent term. This issue has been resolved.
Instructions on how to set up shared locations and web folders in the Content Collection previously displayed natively in Blackboard Learn. In this release, these instructions now lead to help.blackboard.com so the content can be kept up to date.
Some users received a past due notification for assessments, even when they had already submitted ahead of the due date. This issue has been resolved.
In-product help links now appear for all users on the Institution Page.

NewBoxView is default service

Blackboard Learn 9.1 Q4 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.3.0 | Release to Production 4 May 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

Starting with the 3400.3.0 release, New Box View will be the default service (instead of Crocodoc) for all new Blackboard Learn installations. If your institution decided not to transition to New Box View and is upgrading to a more recent version of Blackboard Learn, this change won't affect you unless you are starting with a fresh install for the new target instance.

Randomize question answers (multiple choice/multiple answer)

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.3.0 | Release to Production 4 May 2018
Ultra Course View

Sometimes instructors want to change the display order of question and answer options for individual students to support practice/drilling, as well as to avoid academic dishonesty. Unpredictable order of answers can help reduce the risk of students memorizing material from study guides without truly absorbing the information.

In this release, instructors can now randomize the order of answers in multiple choice and multiple answer questions in the Ultra Course View. Combined with randomized questions, this new option puts more control in the instructor's hands to have assignments and tests appear differently for each student.

More on how to randomize answers in Ultra assessments

Rearrange gradebook with drag and drop

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.3.0 | Release to Production 4 May 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors may not create graded course content in the exact sequence students will complete them. In a course where there is a weekly quiz, weekly discussion, and monthly written assignment, the order of these items in the gradebook may not match the order on the Course Content page. This can be frustrating for instructors and students. Further, students may be confused if they refer to the gradebook as a guide to what they should be working on next, or if they look for their grade on a specific item but can't find it because items appear to be "out of order" in the gradebook.

This release includes the ability for instructors to rearrange gradebook entries in the Ultra Course View. Instructors can drag and drop items in the gradebook so the list appears in an order that makes sense to instructors and students alike. This improvement can save time, confusion, and frustration for users who prefer to browse course content from multiple entry points in a course.

Drag and drop isn't yet available in the gradebook grid view.

More on organizing grade data in the Ultra Course View

Ultra access to the Course Catalog

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.3.0 | Release to Production 4 May 2018
Ultra Experience

Large institutions offer many courses as part of different curricula or degree programs. To help students learn more about the course options and expectations, administrators may want to allow visibility into the current or upcoming courses for those who aren’t yet enrolled. The Course Catalog has been available in the Original Experience. With this release, we bring Course Catalog access to Ultra.

Students and instructors can access the Course Catalog directly from the Courses page. The Catalog contains the same search and browse functions as it had in the Original Experience, allowing users to find courses by course name, ID, description, term, or instructor. If the administrator created categories within the catalog or uses terms to group courses, users can also browse the catalog with this information.

Administrators can make the Course Catalog in Ultra available for all logged in users and for guests by placing a link on the Login page.

Flexible Deployment Option Q2 2018

The Blackboard Learn SaaS Q2 2018 (3400.0.0) release for Flexible Deployment Option customers will soon be available. Contact Blackboard Support to schedule your upgrade for the time and date that works best for you.

This release includes features released as part of continuous delivery releases since 3300.0.0. Use the category filter to narrow down the list of features in this latest release.

A special note from Product Management

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.1.0 | Release to Production 6 April 2018

As we move into 2018, we are thinking about and developing our teaching and learning products toward the greater good of a holistic, next generation digital learning environment through the lens of three critical, unifying product themes: academic effectiveness, learner engagement, and education insight. By focusing on these themes, we will unify the development of our products to empower excellence in teaching and learning, inspire genuine interest, attention, and interaction in the learning process, and enable continuous improvement through accurate and deep understanding of the teaching and learning process.

In the Learn SaaS 3400.1.0 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness and learner engagement. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list into groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Academic effectiveness

Fill in the Blank questions now available in Ultra Course View assessments
Improvements to course conversion process
User interface changes in Ultra assessments

Fill in the Blank questions now available in Ultra Course View assessments

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.1.0 | Release to Production 6 April 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors want to construct context-based questions where the student responds with text as part of a longer text prompt. The system can automatically assess the student response, matching the characters entered compared to the correct answer.

This is the edit view of a fill in the blank question.

With this release, instructors can craft fill in the blank questions to assess student understanding in tests and assignments. Fill in the Blank questions are graded automatically. Answers are scored based on if student answers match the correct answers the instructor provides. Instructors choose the evaluation method for answers:

Exact match
Contains part of the correct answer
Matches a specified pattern

More on Fill in the Blank questions in the Ultra Course View

Improvements to course conversion process

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.1.0 | Release to Production 6 April 2018
Ultra Experience

The Blackboard Learn course conversion experience can be intimidating for instructors, as many features don’t function in Ultra the same way they did in Original. This often causes unexpected course behavior or appearance and can be seen a barrier for Ultra adoption. While many of these changes are minor, there is a need for instructors to know and understand the implications before fully adopting the Ultra Course View.

With this release, we’ve improved the conversion experience so instructors have more insight into what’s changing. Exceptions are now categorized into groups based on priority and potential impact. Instructors can explore their courses and view the exceptions to better understand how students will experience the Ultra Course View.

Institution Page enhancements

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.1.0 | Release to Production 6 April 2018
Ultra Experience

This release includes customization features in the Institution Page. In the existing Helpful Links module, you can now:

Move the module image to the right side or remove the module image
Associate the module image with a hyperlink in the list

LTI placement improvements

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.1.0 | Release to Production 6 April 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Ultra Experience, Original Experience

A number of enhancements have been made to LTI Tool Provider setup and placements:

Administrators can now access LTI Tool Providers directly from the Administrator Panel in the Integrations menu.
There are new naming and capabilities in the placement options for an LTI tool.
- Under Type, the student tool has been renamed to Course tool, with availability options for students and non-students. Student Course tools appear in the Student Tools area and no longer require instructor action for students to use the tool. Non-student Course tools appear in the Control Panel for instructors and other course users with access to the Control Panel.
- The Content Item Message tool type is now the Supports deep linking option within the Course content tool to reflect a name change by the IMS Global organization.
- There is a new Administrator tool placement type, which lets administrators place LTI tools in the Tools and Utilities menu on the Administrator Panel.

Maintenance items for 3400.1.0

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.1.0 | Release to Production 6 April 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Ultra Experience, Original Experience

You can now view maintenance items in Behind the Blackboard. Our Known Issue articles provide information for individual bug fixes, and may include bug descriptions and which Learn versions were affected. You can filter bug fixes by SaaS release for easier navigation. View the 3400.1.0 maintenance issues on Behind the Blackboard.

Miscellaneous updates

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.1.0 | Release to Production 6 April 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

Instructors can sort the roster by student last name in the Ultra Course View.
Attendance in the Original Experience now supports Internet Explorer 11.
File attachments in the Ultra editor were not displaying as expected due to copy/paste behavior. A message has been added to the editor prompting the user to reinsert any pasted attachments to ensure they display correctly for other course members.
Content items in the Original Course View were unexpectedly moving their position in a list after being edited. This issue has been resolved.
Some students who had been removed from an Original course were receiving notifications regarding group activity in the course. This issue has been resolved.
When upgrading Blackboard Learn, the Mobile Building Block’s environment setting was reset and caused issues for users searching for courses via mobile apps. This issue has been resolved.
After an upgrade, the scrollbar in the Grade Center appeared on the left side of the screen and obscured information. This issue has been resolved.

New editor available in multiple areas

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.1.0 | Release to Production 6 April 2018
Ultra Course View

Starting with this release, the editor appears for instructors creating assessments questions and for students drafting freeform responses in assessments, including essays.

Outcomes roles based on Institutional Hierarchy

Blackboard Learn 9.1 Q4 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.1.0 | Release to Production 6 April 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2018
Ultra Experience, Original Experience

When the centralized Assessment team demonstrates the simplicity and time-saving power of Outcomes Assessment, other departments and programs across the institution often want to take advantage of the solution and move their Assessment practices to Outcomes. Historically, though, institutions have been hesitant to roll it out to individual departments because adding Outcomes roles for users outside of the central office would grant full access to the entire institution’s evidence collections, evaluations, and reports.

With this update, we have enhanced Outcomes to respect the access limitations you’ve put in place by configuring Institutional Hierarchy. You can now assign Outcomes roles to key stakeholders within each department and these users will only be able to create evidence collections, manage evaluations, and view reports for courses within their node of the Institutional Hierarchy.

More on Outcomes Assessment in Blackboard Learn SaaS

User interface changes in Ultra assessments

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3400.1.0 | Release to Production 6 April 2018
Ultra Course View

We’ve upgraded the technology that powers assessments in the Ultra Course View. Instructors will notice that the Add Question button no longer opens a panel of options. Now, an instructor can add any type of content to the test or assignment, such as questions, text, and files, using one simple menu in the assessment body. We’ve applied these updates to your existing assessments as well, so you can enjoy this improved experience whether you are creating new assessments or working on existing content.

Cumulative Update 2 for FDO Q4 2017 (release 3300.0.2)

Blackboard Learn SaaS Flexible Deployment Option Q4 2017 (v3300.0.0)
Original Experience

Cumulative Update (CU) 2 for the Q4 2017 Flexible Deployment Option (FDO) release of Blackboard Learn SaaS is available.

More information available on Behind the Blackboard

A special note from Product Management

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.11.0 | Release to Production 9 March 2018

In the Learn SaaS 3300.11.0 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness, learner engagement, and education insight. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list in to groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Additional course activity indicators

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.11.0 | Release to Production 9 March 2018
Ultra Course View, Learner Engagement

When an instructor or student opens an assessment peek panel, an icon appears to notify them of any unread conversation messages. The icon also appears in assessments and documents, as well as on the Course Content page. The submissions list now also includes the activity icon when new conversation messages are unread.

In an earlier release, the icon first appeared only on the Course Content page. Now, the icon appears at additional entry points so the user is notified of activity no matter how they open the content. This enhancement is in direct response to client feedback on Ultra's usability.

Branding and color configuration in the Learn 2016 Theme

Blackboard Learn 9.1 Q2 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.11.0 | Release to Production 9 March 2018
Original Course View

This release includes additional options for users who wish to configure the Learn 2016 theme in all courses. In the Blackboard Learn 2016 theme, Course Menu and Theme color customization is now available through the entire interface.

Instructors and course designers can configure the course colors in the course control panel when using the Learn 2016 Theme. The course menu area appears in these colors in both desktop and mobile experiences. Extended menu areas such as the Control Panel for instructors and My Groups menu for students remain in the gray and white color scheme.

These enhancements apply to courses using the Learn 2016 theme in an Original experience environment.

Clear multiple choice selection

Blackboard Learn 9.1 Q2 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.11.0 | Release to Production 9 March 2018
Original Course View

Students are now able to clear a selection from multiple-choice questions. This lets students avoid a penalty when they’ve made an initial selection and negative points are associated with answer choices.

More on submitting a test attempt in Blackboard Learn

Conditional release enhancements

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.11.0 | Release to Production 9 March 2018
Ultra Course View, Academic Effectiveness

In this release, you'll notice some changes to the visibility menu for course content items in Ultra. The Show/Hide On Date option has been moved to the Conditional Availability panel so instructors can create access rules based on Date/Time.

Additionally, instructors and course builders can choose whether to make the content visible to students before access conditions have been met. For example, if an instructor wants students to know that an exam is part of the curriculum, but not yet available, the instructor can choose conditional availability rules and make the content visible to students before they're able to access it.

Course view option support in SIS integration

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.11.0 | Release to Production 9 March 2018
Ultra Experience

After an institution has moved to the SaaS deployment and enabled the Ultra experience, administrators can manage their courses via bulk operations using Snapshot Flat Files as part of the SIS Integration framework. The new field header name is course_view. This release introduces the ability to specify course view (Original, Ultra, or Instructor Choice) during initial course creation, copying from a master template, and copying from term to term.

More on the Snapshot Flat File data format in Learn SaaS

Maintenance items for 3300.11.0

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.11.0 | Release to Production 9 March 2018
Ultra Experience, Original Experience

You can now view maintenance items in Behind the Blackboard. Our Known Issue articles provide information for individual bug fixes, and may include bug descriptions and which Learn versions were affected. You can filter bug fixes by SaaS release for easier navigation. View the 3300.11.0 maintenance issues on Behind the Blackboard.

Miscellaneous updates

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.11.0 | Release to Production 9 March 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

Instructors can now embed a YouTube or Vimeo video in grade feedback in the Ultra Course View.
Help text on the LTI Placements page in the Administrator Panel has been updated.
An updated version of the Cengage Building Block (v1.101.201704346) is bundled with this release.
A new message appears in the Copy Content panel in the Ultra Course View: You can’t copy content from other courses when you’re in the Ultra Course Preview.
When an instructor creates an availability condition for content in an Ultra course, the custom range previously referred to points when the schema was set to percentage. This issue has been resolved.
Text on the Ally integration page in the Original experience has been updated for readability.
We've made indexing improvements to help speed up the migration from Crocodoc to New Box View.
Previously, instructors using the Swedish language pack in the Original Course View were unable to edit text questions. This issue has been fixed.
In the Original Experience, date selectors broke when a user accessed Blackboard Learn using a browser set to Swedish, Danish, or Spanish. This issue has been fixed.
We’ve improved the LTI launch behavior when the tool is configured to launch automatically.
In the Ultra Experience, when a user saved content in the editor that included multiple breaks to create white space, the editor automatically removed some space. This issue has been resolved.

Outcomes Assessment in the Ultra Course View

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.11.0 | Release to Production 9 March 2018
Ultra Course View, Academic Effectiveness, Education Insight

Institutions use Outcomes Assessment to collect evidence of student work. Previously, the lack of Outcomes Assessment in the Ultra Course View may have prevented these institutions from enabling the Ultra experience. With this release, institutions can use Outcomes Assessment to collect evidence from assessments in both Original and Ultra courses. This release reduces the barrier to Ultra adoption for institutions that use Outcomes Assessment.

Outcomes Assessment can be used in Ultra assessments that don't use individually graded questions.

Rubrics now available in graded discussions

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.11.0 | Release to Production 9 March 2018
Ultra Course View, Academic Effectiveness, Learner Engagement

In many distance learning or online-heavy courses, discussions are the primary source of a class participation grade. Instructors often want to use a rubric when assessing student contributions in a graded discussion to standardize grading. Rubrics help consistently and transparently assess the learner based on well-defined criteria and levels of achievement that can be used as the basis for a numerical grade. Students can view the rubric as they craft their responses and see the scored rubric once their contributions have been graded.

In Ultra courses, we currently have discussions and grading rubrics for assessments. With this release, we're combining the two and allowing instructors to assign existing rubrics or create new rubrics for graded discussions.

A special note from Product Management

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.8.0 | Release to Production 2 February 2018

In the Learn SaaS 3300.8.0 release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness and learner engagement. You’ll see below that we’ve also aligned our feature list in to groups based on value and benefit to you and your users.

Institutional success

Configure default landing page on login
Configure course list for availability exceptions

Engaging course design

Save draft discussion posts
Add Content Collection items to Ultra courses
Additional updates to text editor

Specialized assessment

Allow students to work past assessment time limit
Grade group discussions

Learner engagement

Users can receive notifications via SMS text message
Icons to indicate new activity
Communication improvements

Add Content Collections items to Ultra courses

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.8.0 | Release to Production 2 February 2018
Ultra Course View

Institutions and instructors have invested time and effort to put content into the Content Collection content management system. With this release, there's now an easy way to browse, select, and add that content into an Ultra course. Previously, instructors could access items in the Content Collection in a separate Tools area of the Ultra experience, but the workflow to add the items to a course wasn't streamlined. We've added the option to add Content Collection files to the Course Content page using browse ability.

More on adding Content Collection files to an Ultra course

Allow students to work past assessment time limit

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.8.0 | Release to Production 2 February 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors often need flexibility with how timed tests and assignments are delivered to students for a variety of circumstances. A student temporarily losing internet connection, needing to restart their computer, or a test simply being too long to complete within the given time are just a few possibilities. For these reasons and others, instructors need the option to allow students to continue working on a timed test or assignment after the set time expires.

When an instructor enables this feature, the system indicates which questions were answered after time expired. This helps instructors identify how many questions they may need to remove or when a specific question may be too complex for students to answer within the time limit.

Communication improvements

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.8.0 | Release to Production 2 February 2018
Ultra Course View

We've added the following improvements in course communication based on feedback from our clients.

Instructors can now send a message to groups of students from the Create Groups page in assignments, tests, and discussions.
When a student submits an attempt on behalf of their group, a message appears to confirm that no group member will be able to edit after submission.
We've added new icons and guidance moments for class conversations and group conversations on assessments, when enabled. Previously, a user selected which conversation to view from a drop-down menu.
Students and instructors can use a Refresh icon to load any new conversation or discussion posts since they've opened the page.
We've added the ability to contact users through their profile card in more places.

Configure course list for availability exceptions

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.8.0 | Release to Production 2 February 2018
Ultra Experience

Students may need extended time to access a course due to illness or late registration. This feature allows administrators to open a course for a single student instead of the entire class as an exception to the normal course structure. The course that is re-opened to the student will appear in the course list for the term the course was held, such as Summer 2017.

Configure default landing page on login

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.8.0 | Release to Production 2 February 2018
Ultra Experience

Currently, users are brought to their Activity Stream after they log in to the Ultra experience. The Activity Stream contains some important information, but administrators may prefer that users see the Institution Page or the Courses page upon login. A different landing page can be useful for the beginning of the semester or any other occasion where the Activity Stream may not be the institution's top focus.

To support this administrator preference, we've added the ability to change the page a user is brought to when logging into Blackboard Learn Ultra. You can find the Default Landing Page settings on the Administrator Panel in the The Ultra experience is here! section.

Grade group discussions

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.8.0 | Release to Production 2 February 2018
Ultra Experience

To support instructors who design assessments using groups, we've added the ability to assign grades for group discussions. Instructors may want to use discussion groups to help students feel more comfortable conversing in a course because fewer people are involved. Group discussions can also help students feel freer to speak their minds or encourage students with opposing viewpoints to respectfully make their points.

Instructors can now assign grades to group members in a discussion. Assign grades to individual students to assess their contribution in the context of the group discussion.

Icons to indicate new activity

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.8.0 | Release to Production 2 February 2018
Ultra Course View

Students and instructors want a high-level view of what's happened in their course since they last visited. Are there new discussion posts? Has someone posted a message in the assignment conversation? Rather than having to open each item to see this information, users can now identify items with new activity directly on the Course Content page.

Course activity indicators are being introduced on multiple items in the next few releases. This enhancement is in direct response to client feedback on Ultra's usability.

Maintenance items for 3300.8.0

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.8.0 | Release to Production 2 February 2018
Ultra Experience, Original Experience

You can now view maintenance items in Behind the Blackboard. Our Known Issue articles provide information for individual bug fixes, and may include bug descriptions and which Learn versions were affected. You can filter bug fixes by SaaS release for easier navigation. View the 3300.8.0 maintenance issues on Behind the Blackboard.

Miscellaneous updates

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.8.0 | Release to Production 2 February 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

This release contains a security fix to the login page that could interrupt the way third party SSO solutions pass user credentials from a client portal to Blackboard. A one-time nonce value has been added to the login form. This nonce must be passed back to the server with any POST to the login page. Third-party solutions which rely on posting usernames and passwords directly to /webapps/login/ will fail. This is by design. Clients using supported SSO methods including SAML and CAS aren't affected. Clients experiencing difficulty with custom SSO solutions should file a support ticket on Behind the Blackboard.
An updated version of the Blackboard Partner Cloud Building Block (1.7.2017021408) is bundled with this release.
When a student received a 0 score for a graded item, it appeared as negative on the My Grades page in the Original Course View. This issue has been resolved.
In both experiences, users who requested a new password weren't obligated to enter a new password when navigating to Learn using the recovery link emailed to them. This issue has been resolved.
When exporting a course from the Ultra experience, some course IDs weren't appearing in Firefox. This issue has been resolved.
After upgrading to the 3300.0.0 release, the Default Course View option was reset to Original Course View. This issue has been fixed.
We’ve improved the LTI launch behavior when the tool is configured to launch automatically.
The following Crocodoc to New Box View issues have been addressed:
- Inline comments were appearing as HTML.
- Students replying to instructor comments received an error message regarding session expiration. The vendor has addressed this issue.

Save draft discussion posts

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.8.0 | Release to Production 2 February 2018
Ultra Course View

When formulating a discussion response, each student has a preferred way of collecting thoughts. Similarly, instructors may want to save their initial reactions and have the chance to revise a draft before saving it for all course members to read.

In this release, we've added the ability to save a draft discussion post to support students and instructors who write drafts before they contribute to a discussion. The Save Draft option can be particularly useful for students participating in a graded discussion.

Add and view feedback in a peek panel

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Ultra Course View

Starting with this release, instructors can add feedback in a peek panel in assessments and graded discussions. Previously, the feedback editor appeared at the top of the page, which made it a challenge for instructors and graders to refer to parts of the submission that appeared further down on the page. Now, the feedback panel persists on the side of the screen, so the user can scroll through the assignment and add overall feedback. When the grade and feedback are posted, students can view the feedback in a peek panel as well.

Instructors will also notice that the feedback area now uses the new editor.

Add feedback to multiple attempts quickly

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Ultra Course View

This release includes optimizations to the grading workflow to help save instructors time. To help instructors grade multiple attempts more quickly and provide specific feedback to students, we've added another access point on the Submissions panel. The Add Feedback icon appears next to each attempt listed in the Submissions panel, shortening the workflow when instructors add feedback.

Additional attempts in Anonymous Grading

Blackboard Learn 9.1 Q2 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Original Course View

Instructors can now grant an additional attempt for scenarios when the student needs one and the prior attempt can't be cleared because it is in an anonymous state.

Analytics for Learn reports available in Ultra

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Ultra Course View

If your institution has the A4L Building Block, instructors can access reports in the Analytics area of the Ultra Course View.

Screenshot of the Analytics tab of a course. Premium Reports is underlined and the reports listed below.

This feature allows instructors to access A4L analytics reports in Ultra just as they did in Original courses. These reports allow users to see how their course is performing compared to other students or courses within their department. The A4L reporting engine is a separate tool with its own database. The reports that are generated pull from Blackboard Learn data as well as institutional sources.

More on how instructors can access Analytics for Learn reports in the Ultra Course View

A4L code will now be bundled into releases for SaaS Continuous Delivery deployments. Clients will be required to update the version information to match the Analytics for Learn Extraction Data Version within the settings page for the building block. Affected clients will be notified directly by Client Support.

Conditional release of course content based on student performance

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Ultra Course View

Instructors and instructional designers may want to release content to students incrementally, rather than all at once, to achieve a more tailored and personalized pedagogical experience. To support this, we have introduced functionality to Ultra courses to define rules that control the release of content to students based on performance.

An instructor can set conditional availability for a content item or folder in the Ultra Course View and choose the minimum score a student must achieve on a graded item before being able to access the new item. Access rules can be based on graded items or gradebook columns. Additional types of access rules will be released in the future.

More on how instructors release content based on rules

Embed videos in the new content editor

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Ultra Experience

The Ultra experience includes a new content editor, which is being introduced to certain areas of the application with each new release. Starting with this release, you can use the Insert Video option to insert an embedded video directly into the updated content editor. Simply paste the video source, add alternative text, and save – the editor automatically embeds the video so it appears alongside the other content you include. Students can watch the video within the same window, without having to navigate to the video's host site.

Grade calculations

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Original Course View

A previous release improved consistency of grade rounding and presentation across pages including Grade Center, gradebook download, and My Grades. This is further improved by updating those pages along with APIs (Building Blocks and REST) to all use Java BigDecimal for calculations, increasing consistency in edge cases where different Java methods may have rounded or calculated differently.

Improved LTI user experience

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Original Course View, Ultra Course View

Course tools designated as “student tools” are now located in the student Tools area to improve the user experience and align the location of LTI tools with Building Block tools. Instructors can show/hide the tool in the student Tools area and create links to the tool in Content Areas.

Institution Page

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Ultra Experience

An institution’s staff members, such as administrators, often want to use Blackboard Learn to communicate with instructors and students and to make resources easily accessible and available to the learning community. The Institution Page supports the administrator’s ability to make information available to many users.

In conjunction with Targeted Notifications, the introduction of the Institution Page is a key component in bringing the Tabs and Modules functionality currently available in the Original experience to Ultra. The Institution Page provides users static information that they may find useful, such as help desk links, library resources, advisor info, and any other bit of text/hyperlinking that they need to be aware of. Over time additional modules will be added as well as the ability to convey 3rd party tools/content.

More on how to get started with the Institution Page

The Institution Page is on in the base navigation by default. To hide the Institution Page from users other than administrators, hide all modules from users. Administrators always have access to the Institution Page in the base navigation.

Availability

The Institution Page feature is being introduced to Blackboard Learn Ultra gradually based on the client’s data region. Currently, Institution Pages are available in North America. We’ll introduce the feature in additional regions according to the tentative schedule below:

North America: Currently available
Europe and Sydney: Currently available
Singapore: Targeted for Q1 2018
GovCloud: TBD

LTI Names and Roles services

Blackboard Learn 9.1 Q2 2018
Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Original Course View, Ultra Course View

Integrated tools can retrieve course roster information to support assessment activities or provide better information about the class within the tool. This ability is formerly known as LTI Membership Service.

Maintenance items for 3300.6.0

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Ultra Experience, Original Experience

You can now view maintenance items in Behind the Blackboard. Our Known Issue articles provide information for individual bug fixes, and may include bug descriptions and which Learn versions were affected. You can filter bug fixes by SaaS release for easier navigation. View the 3300.6.0 maintenance issues on Behind the Blackboard.

Miscellaneous updates

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Ultra Experience, Original Experience

In some environments, when attempting a test or assignment with math equation images, students were unable to view the image. This error was due to the image not being stored in the appropriate permanent storage location and has been resolved.
When changing course availability in the Ultra experience, the padlock icon was difficult to visually distinguish as open or closed. The padlock icon has been updated to more clearly show the open or closed state.
Some error messages have been updated to provide more context for users. For example, empty title or message fields in Targeted Notifications say Please type a title or Please type a message respectively, instead of simply Required.
In the Original Course View, users who connected to and browsed content from McGraw-Hill and returned to Blackboard Learn were unable to exit the course. This issue has been fixed with the improvements made to LTI launch return behavior.
When viewing an Ultra graded discussion on a mobile device, students who viewed the settings saw a blank page. This issue has been fixed.
Group assessment grades in the Ultra Course View were not consistently saving when instructors graded and posted from the Submissions view. This issue has been fixed.

New content editor in discussions, conversations, documents, feedback, and assessment questions

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Ultra Course View

We've enhanced the content editor to use more intuitive iconography and organization. Use the options in the menu to format text and paragraphs. You can also insert links and images using a simplified workflow. This new editor will be introduced to other areas of the application over the next few releases.

New text editor in targeted notifications

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Ultra Experience

More on targeted notifications in the Ultra experience

Password reset improvements

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Original Experience, Ultra Experience

Requests using Blackboard Learn's native password reset feature now expire after 15 minutes, improving security of the reset link.

Post all grades at once

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Ultra Course View

This release includes optimizations to the grading workflow to help save instructors time. Instructors now have the option of posting all grades for an item at once rather than for individual students. Instructors can release a student's grade and feedback when they finish grading each attempt, but some prefer to grade multiple items in succession. To help facilitate this grading preference, we've added an option for instructors to post all of those grades at one time, rather than one-by-one.

More on how instructors assign, edit, and post grades

Record attendance in Blackboard Learn

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Original Course View, Ultra Course View

Institutions and instructors want to track attendance for various purposes, including at-risk detection, federal financial aid and accreditation compliance, and to support instructor pedagogical preference where being present is a component of a course grade.

With this release, instructors can track attendance in both experiences. In Ultra courses, a gradebook column is added when the instructor begins taking attendance. The Attendance column provides the overall attendance score in the gradebook, where it can be included in the student’s overall grade.

Based on your data region, some Blackboard Learn features may not be available. Attendance isn't supported on Internet Explorer 11.

Students enter group Collaborate rooms with presenter privileges

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Ultra Course View

Within a group assignment or test, group members may want to communicate with each other about the questions, division of labor, or to review each others’ contributions. For institutions who use Collaborate, groups can use a standing Collaborate session to interact in real-time if the instructor has allowed conversations on the item. Now, when students enter the group Collaborate room, they each have presenter privileges to let them take advantage of more features, such as white boards and application sharing.

More on presenting in a Collaborate session

Support for large monitors

Blackboard Learn SaaS Continuous Delivery v3300.6.0 | Release to Production 12 January 2018
Ultra Experience

To improve the user experience on larger screens, the Ultra interface now spans the entire browser window. Previously, the Ultra interface was restricted to a maximum width to ensure consistent appearance and behavior. Now, users can increase the amount of screen real estate the Ultra experience occupies, if they prefer.