August 17, 2021

In Case You Missed It: BbWorld’s 2021 Blackboard Learn Roadmap

This post is authored by Jim Chalex, Vice President of Product Management

Last month at our BbWorld virtual conference, we enjoyed connecting with many of you – our valued clients from around the world – to share our vision for the future of education and give you details about our recent product developments and news. If you missed it, don’t worry! You can view the sessions on-demand in the event platform until August 21. After that date session content and resources will be migrated to the Blackboard Community Site

I’d also like to recap some of the highlights from our roadmap sessions here. 

Blackboard Learn Original Course View 

First, I’d like to address any potential misinformation regarding the Learn Original Course View. Let me be clear – the Original Course View will be available beyond 2023. The self-hosted and managed-hosted deployment support timelines shared earlier are not connected to the Original Course View, which is available for use on our SaaS deployment. We want to give everyone plenty of time to make the move to the Ultra Course View, which I share more about below.  

In the meantime, we continue to make improvements in the Original Course View, focusing on usability, security and accessibility. I also wanted to call out one item in both the Original and Ultra Course Views specific to how we are supporting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DE&I) within our product – the use and display of pronouns and names. We have spent significant time with student groups and institutional leaders, working with them to strike the right balance between institutional data processes, user control and transparency as we consider how students can better express themselves in our products. The first release of this, planned for later this year, lets students determine their displayed pronouns in Blackboard Learn. The LMS displays this to classmates and instructors at key interaction points. The next phases allow sharing name pronunciation and giving students control over their display names – while ensuring that instructors can associate the student back to other systems of record. 

SaaS Deployment  

We saw a lot of comments at BbWorld from clients who wished they moved to the SaaS deployment of Blackboard Learn sooner. That was great to see! A few years ago, we worked hard to explain the value of SaaS, but now the value of SaaS is widely understood. For example, in a recent client survey, we saw higher satisfaction scores from instructors at institutions hosted in the cloud. They noted a noticeable improvement in the quality of products, ease of use, and depth of functionality. These are some of the reasons why schools are moving to SaaS at a faster pace. An overwhelming 73% of institutions are on SaaS already and we expect 80% of institutions to be on SaaS by the end of 2021.  

As we shared before, we are committed to provide full support for Blackboard Learn managed hosted clients until the end of 2022, and self-hosted clients until the end of 2023. We understand that there may be regulatory or policy reasons that prevent certain clients from making the move to SaaS, and in these cases we are also committed to working together to find solutions to move forward with Blackboard Learn. 

Ultra Course roadmap 

During these types of sessions, many people ask us "What are the priority or focus areas?" Right now, we have a sharp focus on increasing the depth of the assessment, feedback and grading workflows in Ultra, as these align closely with our focus on pedagogy and efficiency. We've made great progress in these areas over last few months: for example, the release of conditional release by user or group, qualitative peer review, the ability to drop the lowest or highest grade, rubrics feedback by criterion, advanced grade book filters, and so forth. Assessment and grading will continue to be an area of focus going forward, and we're already working on improvements to the grading UI, partial credit for fill-in-the-blank questions, points-based rubrics, delivering one question at a time, as well as a more comprehensive user experience research project on the assessment and grading workflows in Ultra. 

You can also expect an increased focus on usability improvements and refinements to existing functionality, as these can have a large impact on the overall student and instructor experience. Examples include things like unread message indicators and displaying grades in different formats. We are adding more depth to the rich text editor in Ultra Courses, ensuring that instructors have more creative freedom. For example, they will have an easier time creating tables that are responsive to mobile devices, incorporating accessibility-compliant colors, and changing font sizes and adding emojis. 

Other Highlights 

We are excited to bring Microsoft Teams classes to the Ultra Course View to expand and support learner interaction and collaboration. Users can now experience the power of Microsoft Teams directly from within their Blackboard Learn Ultra course. This integration is the first in a series of upcoming integration capabilities with the Microsoft collaboration suite. 

Continuing with the engagement theme, we have added the option to provide audio/video feedback to students in the grading workflow. Giving audio/video feedback can help remove a feeling of isolation for students, and greatly personalizes the student experience. Given that the past year of instruction has been mainly online, it became apparent that we needed to extend that personalized option to more areas of the course. Because of this, we will be adding the audio/video functionality to the announcements as well as peer assessment.  

We are also excited to announce a deeper partnership with ConcentricSky, the makers of the Badgr credentialing solution. Blackboard and Badgr have been working closely together to support access to digital credentials within Blackboard Learn, supporting use cases that allow instructors to award badges to students based on key triggers, and how institutions can manage the creation and deployment of learning pathways.  

This would be a long post if I kept going through everything we shared! To hear more, check out the recordings for the Original Course Roadmap and Ultra Course Roadmap

Future Development: Showcasing a Path to Student Success  

Principles of progression can be found in many walks of life, and it’s especially important in educational contexts. Providing a way to track progress allows students to break down work into manageable chunks, and to feel progression and success more frequently throughout their course experiences. 

That’s why I am excited about another project in active development: progress tracking in the Ultra Course. We rolled out phase one of this project in August 2021. In this release, students can mark and track their progress inside their courses. This new feature comes from direct client feedback and aligns with how students and instructors think about pace and progress. Progress tracking will be initially released as an “alpha” feature; those who choose to turn it on will provide Blackboard with valuable input about how the feature functions so that we can improve it in future releases. 

Using progress tracking, students can identify what tasks they’ve started, completed, or haven't interacted with. Students can also manually update their progress on specific items. This is a new level of personalization in Learn Ultra and will help students better understand progression through their course. 

In addition, we have several more enhancements coming that will expand the benefits of marking progress to not just students but also instructors. In later milestones we also plan to expand this capability to all institutions and provide valuable insights on the student’s progress relative to others. 

Feature Flags 

One of the great things about SaaS is that all clients are on the latest and greatest version of our product, which means getting new features quickly, and ensuring the highest possible quality. Despite this, we understand that there are times during the year that are not ideal to release new, larger features. With that in mind, we wanted to give institutions more control to roll out some of these larger changes on their own timeline. To support this, system administrators will be able to review and optionally turn on certain features over a period of time. We expect that this change will give administrators even more choice and control over managing change with instructors and students, while still enjoying the advantages of being on our latest release.  

Community Involvement in the Roadmap 

Anyone who has met me knows that engaging with clients is my favorite part of the job, and it’s important to me that we support multiple channels for communication and feedback. For example, we have our Ultra Advisory Program that meets monthly where clients can review new features and ask question directly to the product team.  

Also, if you aren’t already on the Community Site, I highly recommend you join it. Along with getting questions answered by us or your peers, there’s a way to enter feature ideas, which the product management team reviews frequently and directly influences our roadmap. For example, two recent features — showing an overall grade as a percentage and unread message indicators in the Base Navigation — came directly from the Community Site.  We’re adding more Community Managers on the product management team to keep the conversation going, so keep the ideas coming!  

Disclaimer 

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. 

Anthology power symbol over a gradient background

The Anthology Team