In Winter 2021, Grand Valley began a process of selecting a new learning management system (LMS). After extensive vendor demos, multiple faculty surveys, topic-specific working groups, and conversations with campus stakeholders, a decision was made to select Blackboard's Learn Ultra product. The University believes that Ultra will best support instruction, increase student engagement, and meet future strategic online demands.

Winter 2022. Courses use Blackboard Classic and are self-hosted by GVSU.

• March 1. Spring/Summer courses are made available to faculty beginning for early course development.
• May 3 at 3pm. Blackboard will become unavailable until the morning of May 8, 2022 as all the information in GVSU's Blackboard system is migrated to Blackboard's cloud system.
  • This is an approximate date that may change once Blackboard starts receiving our migration timeline information.
  • This scheduled downtime will also happen at least 3 hours after grades are due. 
  • A definite timeline will be published and communicated to the GVSU community well before the scheduled migration.  
  • Courses that run past the Winter 2022 semester end will work with eLearning Technologies to get access to offline content for grading purposes.
• Once the move is complete, all courses will be available using the original Blackboard Classic view.

Spring/Summer 2022. Courses continue to use Blackboard Classic.

• Blackboard Ultra training begins for faculty, staff, and students.
• The old MyBb portal is replaced with a new portal using Ultra Base Navigation.
• Faculty who use Blackboard Collaborate should take advantage of eLearning's many Zoom training options.

Fall 2022. Courses continue to use Blackboard Classic.

• A selection of pilot courses begin using the new Blackboard Ultra Course View.
• Blackboard Collaborate is no longer available. Faculty should use Zoom for webinars, collaboration, and synchronous meetings.
• Blackboard Ultra training continues.

Winter 2023. Courses continue to use Blackboard Classic.

• Additional courses pilot the new Blackboard Ultra Course View.
• Blackboard Ultra training continues.
• Courses for the Spring/Summer semester are created using the new Ultra Course View.

Spring/Summer 2023. Courses begin using the new Ultra Course View.

• Blackboard Ultra training continues.
• Blackboard Classic will no longer be available for new courses.

Fall 2023. All courses at GVSU use the Ultra Course View.

• Blackboard Ultra training continues.

Benefits of Ultra Base Navigation

• Ultra Navigation provides new ways to for faculty and students to see across their courses all at once. Instructors, for example, will have one view that shows items that need to be graded for all the courses that they teach.
• Students can get a big picture view of what's happening across their courses through the new Activity Stream and global calendar.
• Blackboard no longer reloads every time you click something or opens extra windows. Instead, as you move through courses—viewing and editing items—each new click adds a "layer" on top of what you were already looking at. Going back to a previous step is as easy as clicking the correct layer.
• Faculty interested in getting a deeper understanding of Ultra Base Navigation and some of the new functionality available, we have scheduled several UBN training sessions in Sprout.

Benefits of the Cloud

Moving to the "software as a service" version of Blackboard brings many benefits behind the scenes. However, there are some benefits that everyone will notice.

• Right now, fixing or upgrading Blackboard requires making it entirely unavailable. That's really challenging, considering that classes take place nearly year-round. The cloud version of Blackboard can be upgraded while faculty and students keep using it.
• Currently, we can only upgrade Blackboard once or twice a year. Since it doesn't require downtime, small updates to the cloud version of Blackboard can be made more frequently. That means when problems appear, or new enhancements become available, they can be applied immediately.

Benefits of Ultra Course View

• The new Ultra Course View has a cleaner design, makes it easier for students to find their courses, and reduces the number of clicks that faculty need to make when adding and editing content.
• Ultra gives instructors control over when students are able to see newly entered grades. Instructors can post individual grades, or wait and post all the grades for a particular assignment at once.
• Instructors can set accommodations for a student once and have them applied to all assessments in their course.
• Ultra gives users greater control over their personal settings, including their preferred personal pronouns.
• Blackboard Ultra includes progress tracking for students, giving them an easy way to keep track of what they have done in each of their courses. Students can easily identify tasks they have started, completed, or haven't yet begun.
• Discussion Boards in Ultra have received a massive upgrade. Instead of living in a separate area, discussions can be added anywhere within a course site. When faculty grade discussions they also have access to a detailed discussion analysis that provides insight on the level of complexity and critical thinking in a student's posts compared to their classmates.

In addition to the LMS migration from Blackboard Classic to Ultra, Grand Valley will also be transitioning away from the use of Collaborate for webinars and synchronous meetings. As of Fall 2022, faculty will be asked to use Zoom instead of Collaborate.

Explore a comparison of Zoom and Collaborate

Download the comparison as an Acrobat PDF