Blackboard Collaborate Ultra allows you to add a human element to your course, by offering an all-in-one platform for web conferencing anywhere, anytime! You can connect with one student, or your entire class. Students can collaborate with each other, using audio, video, and recording functions to capture their experience.
Want to learn more? Explore the information we've provided here, and when you're ready to implement this into your course, send us an email to speak with our team!
Collaborate Ultra is completely web-based, and provides a smooth and modern experience for facilitators and learners alike.
Check out this quick video to get familiar with how Ultra looks and feels:
Familiarize yourself with the Ultra experience Session page in your Blackboard course:
Button | Feature | Function |
---|---|---|
Course Room | The Course Room is a session set to be run continuously in the background of your course. The Course Room can be used by you and your students to facilitate ad-hoc online meetings. | |
Session Options | Located to the right of each session, the Session Options button can be used to join an open session, get the anonymous dial in for a session, edit a sessions settings, view reports, and copy the session's guest link. | |
Create Session | Click Create Session to create a new scheduled session. For more information about creating sessions, please visit our resource on Creating and Managing Sessions in Ultra. | |
Scheduled Session | Click the name of a scheduled session to join the session. Instructors can also click the name of a session to edit the Event Details. |
Upon launching Collaborate Ultra for the first time in your browser, you'll be prompted to start a tutorial to help familiarize yourself with the tools--and help you set up your audio and video too!
If you'd like to make changes to your settings after you've completed the tutorial or if you upgrade your hardware, simply open the Collaborate settings panel, and select the gear icon to click "Setup your camera and microphone".
If you'd like to create a session, select Create Session from the Sessions screen. To manage sessions, find the session you want to edit and select Session options and Edit settings.
While most settings can be changed any time during the session, you must set some settings before the session begins if you want to use them.
Let's explore session settings:
Learn how to successfully share your slides:
Polling in Collaborate Ultra
Polls are great to engage your attendees and keep them interested. Start a discussion by asking your attendees their opinion on something. Ask questions to see how well they understood what you presented. Or use reflective questions to help them retain what you presented. Attendees respond to your poll by selecting one of up to five responses. You decide how many choices attendees see.
Let's learn more:
Breakout Groups
To facilitate small group collaboration, you can create breakout groups that are separate from the main room and assign participants to them. Breakout groups have their own private audio, video, whiteboard, application sharing, and chat. Any collaboration that takes place in a group is independent of the Main room (and other groups).
Let's learn more:
After a scheduled session is over, you can run an attendance report to receive a participants who attended the live session. To run an attendance report:
Here's what you'll see in the report:
Label |
Feature |
Function/Information |
---|---|---|
A | Session Details | Scheduled session information including the time and date it occurred, the number of attendees (includes moderators, presenters, and participants), and average time users spend in the session. |
B | Export Reports | Download the report to a printable page or excel spreadsheet. |
C | Name | Names of the people who attended the live session. |
D | Role | The roles of the people who attended the live session. |
E | Type | How attendees accessed the session. LTI means through Blackboard, and invitee indicates that they entered through the guest link. |
F | First Join | Time when the attendee first entered the session. |
G | Last Leave | Time when the attendee exited the session and did not return. |
H | Total Time | How long the attendee spent in the session. If they joined multiple times throughout the session, this is the sum of the time they spent in the session. |
I | Joins | How many times the attendee entered the live session. |
J | Joins Breakdown | Specific information about how many times an attendee entered the session, with individual enter and leave times per join. |