Overview: Ultra Base Navigation

Say goodbye to the old Blackboard Learn homepage - and say hello to Bb Learn Ultra Base Navigation (UBN), USA's next step in progressing to Blackboard Learn's more modern, intuitive navigation. UBN will not change how your courses look, only change the homepage. The new homepage will provide quick access to the most critical information from across all your courses. UBN has a sleek, modern look and feel and saves you time with simpler workflows and easier access to important information.

Benefits to UBN

Modern, intuitive user experience.
Designed to improve user efficiency.
Minimizes clicks.

Aggregates important info such as calendar and grades/grading – now consolidated into one global view.
Works well on mobile devices.

Let’s look at what UBN looks like:

Institution Page

The USAHS Institution Page is the new Blackboard Homepage. This page is the go-to resource for your academic community. Find resources, useful links, and other important content related to your institution.

Here you can find news, updates, and helpful links, as well as useful tools such as Kaltura My Media.

Activity Stream

The activity stream page is all new for Ultra Base Navigation. The Activity Stream has up-to-the-minute action on most important info for all courses and is grouped into 4 categories: Important, Upcoming, Today, and Recent.

Important: Students see overdue assignments, tests, and graded discussions that need their immediate attention. The number of items in this section makes up the count shown by Activity Stream in the list where your name appears. If you dismiss an item in this section, you won't be able to view it again even if you sign out and sign in again. When you dismiss a stream item, the original content isn't affected. You just remove the notification from the activity stream.

Upcoming: View your top five events that will happen in the next seven days. Select Show More for a complete list. This section doesn't appear if you don't have upcoming events.

Today: See everything happening and due in the next 24 hours, including institution-wide announcements about emergency notifications and updates. If you added course announcements, they appear here or in the Recent section for students.

Recent: If you haven't checked in for a bit, view stream items that were previously in the Today section over the last seven days. Students always see reminders about overdue work in the Important section.

Course events that trigger notifications in INSTRUCTOR’S Activity Stream:

Content you added to your courses, such as assignments and tests
New blogs, journal entries, or wiki pages students added

Student-submitted items that are ready for grading
Course messages or replies you received
Alerts for students falling behind
New courses available
Events you added to your course

Announcements you added
Events that are happening today
Events that are happening soon

Courses

The courses page is also all new in UBN. On this page, you can navigate to past, present, and future courses. This page defaults to a list of “Current Courses” in which you’re enrolled, organized by semester (plus assorted dates at the bottom)

The arrows at top can be used to navigate between terms to view courses associated with a specific trimester.

Favorite courses (starred), appear at top of applicable filtered lists

You can also use the dropdown menu to filter courses by term:

Organizations

The organizations page if where all your organizations will appear. The page is identical to the courses page, but only contains organizations.

Calendar

The calendar is not a new tool for Blackboard, but it has been brought to the front where it can be viewed more easily. From the global calendar in the list where your name appears, you can see all your upcoming due dates and meetings across your courses—all in one place.

In your calendar, you will find due dates. When you create content with a due date, it appears automatically in the calendar.

When you access the calendar from inside a course, it shows events for that course only. Select the Calendar tab from the course's navigation bar.

The course view of the calendar displays due dates, the course schedule, and course-specific meetings and events. When you create content with a due date, it appears automatically in the calendar.

To find more information on the calendar (such as sharing it with other apps), please follow this link: https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Ultra/Courses/Calendar#ultra_nav

Tools

The tools page will contain links to areas of Blackboard not associated with a course or organization. A good example is Kaltura My Media.

Rich Text Editor Functions

Table of Rich Text Editor functions, and support in Learn Ultra System Announcements:

Rich Text Box Feature	Learn - Original	Learn - Ultra
Bold Text	Yes	Yes
Italics Text	Yes	Yes
Underline Text	Yes	Yes
Strikethrough Text	Yes	Yes
Header Formatting	Yes	Yes
Different Fonts	Yes	Yes
Font Size	Yes	Yes
Bulleted List	Yes	Yes
Numbered List	Yes	Yes
Text Color	Yes	No
Highlighting Text	Yes	No
Alignment (left, center, right, full)	Yes	No
Superscript	Yes	Yes
Subscript	Yes	Yes
Line	Yes	Yes
Horizontal List	Yes	No
Insert nonbreaking space character	Yes	No
Blockquote	Yes	No
Symbol (e.g. Copryright symbol)	Yes	No
Emoticons	Yes	No
Anchor	Yes	No
Table	Yes	No
Browse My YouTube Videos	Yes	Yes
Insert File	Yes	Yes
Insert from Cloud Storage - Dropbox	Yes	Yes
Insert from Cloud Storage – OneDrive	No	Yes
Insert from Cloud Storage – Box	No	Yes
Insert from Cloud Storage – OneDrive for Business	No	Yes
Insert from Cloud Storage – Google Drive	No	Yes
Insert Image	Yes	Yes
Insert Embedded Media	Yes	Yes
Insert LTI	No	Yes
Math Editor	Yes	Yes
Mashups (YouTube)	Yes	No

More Training and Resources

Visit the iLife page here: https://usahs.sharepoint.com/sites/ILIFE/SitePages/Blackboard-Ultra.aspx