Filter the list of features or view the known issues (available in English only).
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Changes coming with the March Release of Blackboard Collaborate with the Ultra Experience
To better support users of Blackboard Collaborate with the Ultra Experience, we are excited to announce these changes to browser support in the March release:
- Adding native WebRTC-based support for users in Safari® 11 on macOS, Safari 12 on macOS®, and Microsoft Edge® on Windows® 10.
- Adding (beta) native WebRTC-based support for users of Safari in iOS 11 and iOS 12.
- Ending support for browsers that do not natively support WebRTC, and require the use of Adobe Flash® for media - this means ending support for Internet Explorer® 11 on Windows and Safari 10 on Mac OS.
When Blackboard Collaborate with the Ultra Experience was released in 2015, Adobe Flash was a significant enabling technology for live media in the browser. This was at a time when only Google ChromeTM supported WebRTC well enough for the interactive demands of online classrooms with hundreds of participants. Today, every major, modern browser has support for WebRTC.
WebRTC provides a superior experience to Flash for media access, with the ability to view multiple speaker videos, higher quality audio and video, and better bandwidth adaptation.
In July 2017, Adobe announced the end-of-life for the Flash plugin to take effect at the end of 2020. Browser vendors have communicated plans for ending support of Flash in their browsers and are making it difficult to enable and use Flash. These decisions make it clear that the best path forward for Collaborate with the Ultra Experience is with browsers that natively support WebRTC.
In addition to our support for WebRTC in Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox®, we are excited to add support for WebRTC in Safari 11, Safari 12, iOS 11, iOS 12, and Microsoft Edge. We are confident that focusing on these technologies strengthens our ability to provide our users with the best possible experience.
Collaborate December 2018 release
In this release, we focused on resolving issues to continually improve your experience. We fixed a session server crash issue that was causing sessions to be disrupted when they were migrated to a new session server.
Support for SRT caption files for recording post-captioning
We recently added the ability to upload a caption file to your recordings in the Collaborate Scheduler user interface (UI). These captions are then displayed in the playback of the recording. When we released this capability, we only supported the WebVTT (Web Video Text Tracks) caption file format. We have now also added support for SRT (SubRip Subtitle) caption file.
Upload a SRT caption file to add or replace captions in recordings. From Recordings, find the recording you want, open the Recording options menu, and select Add caption source.
See when someone is typing in chat
Most students are extremely comfortable with some form of text-based communication. You may see students participate in chat who might be hesitant to speak up in audio/video settings.
Now you can see when someone is typing in chat. Monitor chat to see if someone is about to ask a question or make a comment.
One person is typing
Several people are typing
Attendee report
Collaborate October release details on Behind the Blackboard (available in English only)
The Attendee report provides administrators with an overview of all sessions, and session attendee details, beyond what is in the Session attendance report today. This may include the time the session was opened, the time the session was closed, each attendee’s join time, and their leave time.
The Attendee report is available as a CSV download only, and must be requested by your Institutional administrator through our Customer Support team. Submit a case on Behind the blackboard to request the report (available in English only). Requests must come from an Institutional Collaborate Administrator.
Recording report
Collaborate October release details on Behind the Blackboard (available in English only)
The Recording report provides administrators with data about their institution’s recordings. This data includes the recording name, a link to the recording, recording creation date and time, and the total duration of the recording.
The Recording report is available as a CSV download only, and must be requested by your Institutional administrator through our Customer Support team. Submit a case on Behind the blackboard to request the report (available in English only). Requests must come from an Institutional Collaborate Administrator.
Session timer
Introducing the session timer. Moderators can set a timer for everyone in the session or make it just visible to other moderators. Open the Collaborate panel, select Share Content and start the Timer.
User Management
We are excited to introduce user management from the Collaborate with the Ultra experience!
Managers and administrators will now be able to manage user accounts directly in the Ultra experience of Collaborate. No more switching experiences.
A special note from Product Management
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 Collaborate Ultra 18.7 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.
Universal design
- Manually upload VTT caption transcripts to your recordings
- Request a metric report
Metric report
The Metric report is designed to provide a detailed overview of your Collaborate with the Ultra experience usage. Information includes the frequency and scale your institution is using so you can make informed decisions about the service.
The Metric report is available as a CSV download only, and must be requested by your Institutional administrator through our Customer Support team. Submit a case on Behind the blackboard to request the report (available in English only). Requests must come from an Institutional Collaborate Administrator.
Add captions later
Upload a VTT caption file to add or replace captions in recordings. From Recordings, find the recording you want, open the Recording options menu, and select Add caption source.
More on the 18.7 release date and times on Behind the Blackboard
Coming in 2018: Three new administrator reports
We are excited to introduce three new administrator reports coming in 2018.
- Metric report: Designed to provide a detailed overview of your Collaborate with the Ultra experience usage. Information includes the frequency and scale your institution is using so you can make informed decisions about the service.
- Recording report: This report will provide administrators with data about their institution’s recordings. This data will include the recording name, a link to the recording, recording creation date and time and the total duration of the recording.
- Attendee report: This report will provide administrators with an overview of all sessions, and session attendee details. This may include the time the session was opened, the time the session was closed, the IP address of each attendee in the session, each attendee’s join time, and their leave time.
More on the new administrator reports
Statements regarding our product development initiatives, including new products and future product upgrades, updates or enhancements represent our current intentions, but may be modified, delayed or abandoned without prior notice and there is no assurance that such offering, upgrades, updates or functionality will become available unless and until they have been made generally available to our customers.
A special note from Product Management
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 Collaborate Ultra 18.6 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.
Universal design
- Made accessibility improvements to improve the user experience.
Maintenance release with accessibility improvements
We are pleased to inform you that we have rescheduled the release of Collaborate with the Ultra experience June 2018 (v18.6) update for Friday, June 15, 2018. To learn more, see the release bulletin on Behind the Blackboard (available in English only).
View maintenance items in Behind the Blackboard. Our Known Issue article provide information for individual bug fixes, and may include bug descriptions. View the 18.6 maintenance issues on Behind the Blackboard.
A special note from Product Management
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 Collaborate Ultra 18.4 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.
Digital collaboration
- Improved presentation of recurring sessions.
- Added the ability to export the Session Attendance report as a CSV file.
- Improved the experience with sharing files.
Universal design
- Made accessibility improvements to improve the user experience.
- Improved how long attendee names are handled.
Collaborate Ultra 18.4
Recurring sessions
From the sessions list, the next occurrence of a recurring session is visible. Select Show occurrences to view all occurrences of the session.
Session Attendance report CSV export
Moderators can now export session attendance reports as a CSV file to view and manipulate in Excel.
Sharing files
Moderators can now see what file is currently shared and stop sharing. Select Share files to change what you are sharing.
Sessions list
Sessions are now displayed in a simpler list layout to improve the accessibility user experience.
Long attendee names
Long attendee names are now better handled in the application. You can now point over a truncated long name to see a tooltip displaying the full name.
Guest names have been limited to max 128 characters to prevent issues in the application.
A special note from Product Management
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.
Maintenance release with accessibility improvements
In this Collaborate 18.3 maintenance release, we focused our development and design on academic effectiveness.
Universal design
- Made accessibility improvements to improve the user experience.
Phone only dial-in, recording name, status and application bandwidth improvements
Phone only dial-in
Moderators must allow users to join their session using a telephone before attendees can dial-in.
You can now call into a Collaborate session without joining the session on a browser. From your list of sessions, select the name of the session you want to call into. Select the Anonymous dial-in information from the menu. Your device calls the number. Type the PIN to join the session.
Copy the number and PIN from the settings menu to put it in a calendar item.
This new dial-in option is anonymous. When you use Anonymous dial-in, your phone is not paired with your account or session avatar. You appear in the session as an anonymous caller to other attendees.
Edit recording names
Give your recordings a new name. Access Recordings from your scheduler. Find the recording you want to edit. Open the Recording options and select Edit name.
The recording name always begins with the session name. Edits to the name change the text after the backslash (/) only.
Application sharing bandwidth improvements
We are making changes to reduce blurriness when viewing application sharing.
Previously, when the browser reported a drop in available bandwidth, Collaborate would continue to prioritize the audio stream and send a lower quality application sharing stream, resulting in a blurry screen for the viewer. This usually lasted a few seconds, until the browser reported more available bandwidth. This was happening more frequently than true network capacity indicated. Now, we use additional measurements for a more accurate picture of network conditions, which greatly reduces the frequency of the blurry moments.
Single menu for your settings, feedback, and status
See what your network connection is at-a-glance. If your connection is poor or broken, you see an alert associated with your profile picture. You see one bar for a poor connection, three for good, and four for excellent.
When you select your profile picture you can see your status and settings.
- Select My Settings to set up your audio, notifications, and profile picture
- View your connection status
- Change your session status
- Leave the session
- Give feedback
Improvements to file conversion
In this release, we improved our file conversion capabilities. The conversion makes sure PowerPoint and PDF files uploaded to Collaborate are accessible.
More on the Collaborate 18.1 Support Bulletin (available in English only)
More on the new PowerPoint conversion process (available in English only)
Maintenance release
The December 2017 release is a maintenance release. In this release we focused on resolving issues to continually improve your experience.
Collaborate with the Ultra experience (17.10)
In this release, we made a few enhancements to your Collaborate experience.
- Attendees who are using their phone for audio can continue to use it after closing their browser window.
- By default, participants can chat privately with anybody in the session. In Session Settings, moderators can limit private chat with moderators only.
- Now, after you report an issue and select Submit, you can choose to Create a case on Behind the Blackboard directly from your session.
- The Participants panel is now called the Attendees panel.
View the detailed Collaborate v17.10 release notes
Collaborate Ultra Building Block update
Add Collaborate Ultra to your group tools.
Instructors can add Collaborate Ultra sessions to Groups pages in the Original Course View of Blackboard Learn. If instructors allow, students can share content and use the whiteboard, as well as create recordings. Institutions need a Collaborate license to use this in their courses.
More on course groups for instructors
Improvements to session and recording launch experience
In this release, we’ve made your sessions and recordings more secure and adjusting the range of application sharing bandwidth.
Improvements to Chat and Breakout groups
The August 2017 release focuses on improving your experience with chat and breakout groups.
Collaborate in Blackboard Instructor
Blackboard Instructor is a mobile app that enables instructors to view course content, connect with students in discussions, and interact classes in Blackboard Collaborate. The app is available on iOS and Android mobile devices.
