For the 2024-25 academic year, the College of William and Mary launched a new online learning software, Blackboard Ultra, for students and professors. Previously known as Blackboard, the reimagined interface aims to enhance the student experience, simplify navigation and better facilitate access to course materials.
Blackboard Ultra’s debut marks a technological innovation for students and faculty, which the College hopes will ultimately improve learning outcomes.
The College launched the original Blackboard site in 1999, making the official switch from record-keeping by-hand. Few updates had been made to the software until 2018, when the launch of Ultra Base Navigation on Blackboard modernized the user interface and introduced the ‘activity stream’ for centralized notifications.
Professor of economics Berhanu Abegaz began his career at the College when Blackboard was still in its early stages. In an interview with the Flat Hat, Abegaz shared his positive reception to the platform’s first edition, despite the significant adjustment.
“There was a sense of insecurity using Blackboard, but the conveniences outweighed the risks,” Abegaz said.
With regards to Blackboard Ultra, Abegaz suggested the new system was largely redundant. Even with the various improvements advertised by the College and the new visual format, he believes the platform is not all that different from its predecessor.
“Blackboard Ultra, they say, is an improvement over the old version,” Abegaz said. “You can use your mobile devices to engage in the system and it tracks student progress better, there’s improved navigation, they say and so on. I don’t see those advantages. Once you master it, then you realize you are doing the same thing you did with the old version.”
Some professors have experienced difficulties with the system. Visiting teaching professor of art history Kexin Ma ’17 raised concerns about Blackboard Ultra’s support of high resolution images, which she says is necessary for analyzing images of highly detailed art with her students.
“Especially for art history, we have a lot of images where it’s high-resolution,” Ma said. “So the files will be quite large in size. That’s one of the major issues I’ve encountered so far, where I’ve got students asking me, ‘oh I couldn’t really open it up’ or it’s really slow to open up a big file like that. But I still don’t really want to compress them because the images are quite important for art history study.”
Ma also talked about her use of other systems, citing Moodle as a possible alternative to Blackboard. She described Moodle as a more austere and less colorful platform with some extra functions concerning class participation.
“The layout is definitely not that colorful or anything compared to Blackboard, but I would say in terms of discussion posts, I think the students kind of enjoy that as well,” Ma said. “We create non-synchronous, interactive sessions on Moodle, where we upload pre-recorded lectures and students can have discussions below that.”
Ma also mentioned the voluntary Blackboard Ultra training she attended this summer. The session helped her bridge the gap between the older Blackboard she had used as a student at the College and the reimagined version implemented this year.
“It’s not mandatory, I just thought it might be good to learn how to deal with this new system that I’m not really familiar with,” Ma said. “Because when I was a student here, we used a much older version of Blackboard. So I did attend a training session offered by the College, which was quite helpful actually.”
Professor of history Philip Daileader, believes the overall comprehensibility of Blackboard has increased with the new update. He shared that the site’s more complex features are now largely hidden from view on the home page, simplifying navigation of the website.
“The complex, more advanced features that were kind of shoved in your face all the time, now you have to go find them in Blackboard if you want to use them,” Daileader said. “And since I don’t want to use them, I don’t have to wade my way through them. So for me, I’m rather happy about that. But I can understand how someone else might not be so happy about that.”
Daileader emphasized that Blackboard has only ever played a supporting role in his teaching. He explained that as long as communication with students and record keeping are possible without too many barriers, the website has fulfilled its purpose.
“As someone who came here in 1998, I still regard Blackboard, and I’ll always regard Blackboard, as kind of secondary to my teaching,” Daileader said. “It’s not the main vector for educating people. For me, it’s a means of communicating with students, record keeping, and making some readings more easily available. So what I’m putting up there, there’s nothing fancy. I don’t try to do too much with it, and that may be one of the reasons why I’m happier with it.”
Abegaz also attended training sessions last spring geared toward preparing faculty for the switch to Blackboard Ultra. He finds that the College provides better support related to major technological changes than they have in the past.
“Support has improved dramatically,” Abegaz said. “The College was buying this expensive hardware but not hiring support staff. But now that problem is more or less fixed and they’re really very friendly.”
While the College’s interventions have been helpful, Abegaz highlighted the continued necessity for adjustment and learning curve that professors will experience this semester.
“I’m still nervous about it, so I’m going to bring hardcopy versions of test number one just in case we encounter glitches as an additional cost,” Abegaz said. “So yeah, the younger faculty learn faster, but we’ll have to learn. So even the older ones like me are still engaged in the process now.”
For Sarah Morid ’27, the switch to Blackboard Ultra has not optimized her life as a student in any special way. However, she doesn’t see any glaring issues with the platform.
“I didn’t really notice that we changed because I didn’t see a significant difference,” Morid said. “But it’s fine. It meets my needs, but Blackboard met my needs as well. I’m not really particular or anything.”
Julia Zhang ’27 appreciates the addition of a checkmark symbol to signify that an assignment has been completed, but otherwise sees no major improvements in the update.
“I also didn’t really notice any differences,” Zhang said. “I guess the checkmarks are nice when it shows that you’re in progress. But that’s about the only positive I would say. Any other time, I don’t think there’s a lot of noticeable, really good improvements that I can see.”