Odessa College has jumped from Blackboard Learn original to Blackboard Ultra, which offers a sleeker, cleaner, more modern design.
“… It looks a lot more modern, which is kind of nice. But there’s been kind of a steep learning curve with it. Because it’s still so new, there are a lot of bugs that are being worked out,” said Julie Lyon, senior instructional designer at OC.
“But Blackboard has been very responsive to us, which has been nice. We went with Blackboard Ultra last summer, so we launched all of our summer courses in Blackboard Ultra and we were sending the work orders whenever our faculty reported anything that wasn’t working as expected. So we sent probably 80 work orders and just a short period of time. It was all serious stuff … that needed to be addressed so that we could maintain functionality,” Lyon said.
Blackboard is considered a learning management system. It has everything that students need for their courses in one centralized location.
Blackboard Ultra was launched in March 2021.
It helps students get started on Blackboard, there is tutoring help, their assignments are on it, videos, grades and information among many other things.
Students can also interact with each other through the system.
The system also helps professors tell if any part of students’ work has been plagiarized.
The company started paying a little more attention to OC and now they have monthly meetings with the college.
“There was a team of, of people that were contracted with Blackboard to help institutions convert their courses to Ultra, and so they decided to put them working with us at no cost to us. The institution was called K 12. But they were working with higher ed institutions and courses. There was nothing that they could do for us. We’d already done it all because this is how Odessa College works. … When we’re tasked with something, we kind of go in full force …,” Lyon said.
The completely converted from Original to Ultra within that first eight-week period.
“We said we gave it 90 days because we had our two summer periods, and then getting ready for fall during that period. But we went from zero courses to all of our courses in Ultra, so it was a big conversion process and a lot of learning for our faculty,” Lyon said.
She added that they led up to it with professional learning sessions on what to expect.
“They had a platform that they could get in and play with courses in a test environment so they could learn how to use it a little bit better. So it wasn’t like, boom, it’s all new,” Lyon said.
It still was new for a lot of people.
Lyon, who won the Blackboard Exemplary Course Program Award, said there were some faculty champions who really liked the new learning management system and helped faculty adjust.
“… At the time we switched over to Ultra, Ultra did not provide the support we needed for the course syllabus. There’s a there’s legislation that requires that we have the syllabi for all of our credit courses available within three clicks of the homepage. Ultra did not allow us to do what we were doing with the original Blackboard,” Lyon said.
They had to bring on a different syllabus management system.
“So that was all new and then also our media platform stopped providing support to higher education. They just do K-12 and small business enterprises right now, and not any higher education entities anymore. And so we had all of these massive changes that happened all at once,” Lyon said.
She said the media platform was kind of like YouTube featuring mostly videos, but it’s only available to Odessa College.
Lyon added that they provide regular professional learning sessions in Blackboard Ultra — the various things it does, the tools that are in it and the new things that are coming on board with Blackboard Ultra. They did a presentation at Anthology Together, a top ed tech event, in Florida this year. Anthology is the parent company of Blackboard.
“They asked us to come and present on what we did to transition in such a quick way. We talked about our process and the process that led up to it I think is probably the most important — trying to get everybody excited about it and providing a lot of training. But then we also made sure that everybody was aware that it wasn’t completely rainbows and unicorns; we did have a lot of issues,” Lyon said.
Blackboard had never experienced anybody transitioning as quickly as OC did from Blackboard original to Ultra.
“It was surprising to them. I don’t know how other people do it where it’s not quick, but apparently they do it just kind of incrementally,” Lyon said.
Videos were made of the various issues OC faculty were experiencing, so Blackboard got to see and hear from faculty about their frustrations and she said she thinks it really helped Blackboard.
Lyon said OC isn’t the biggest entity Blackboard serves, but Blackboard and Anthology are keeping an eye on OC.
Lyon started at OC in 2013 and the college only had about a third of its classes on Blackboard. Now 100 percent of all classes have a Blackboard presence, even the face-to-face courses.
They now have about 1,500 courses on Blackboard each 16-week term and another 500 that come in on the eight-week terms.
“So there’s a couple thousand courses,” Lyon said.
