Staff development workshops

You will need to watch the short Blackboard Ultra Orientation video (5 mins) before attending any workshops.

On this page

I manage educational content in Blackboard courses

  1. Designing your course
  2. Building interactivity
  3. Designing Assessments
  4. Course Building Retreat

I administer Blackboard courses

  1. User Management
  2. Assessments, Tests and Gradebook
  3. Assessment Workflow Management
  4. Surgery

I mark assessments

We recommend you complete the workshops within each strand of training in the order suggested.

Requesting engagement:

  • Local training: To arrange or deliver training for your team, see Arrange or deliver local training option next to each workshop on this page.
  • Project engagement: To arrange a project overview for your staff, please email blackboard-ultra@bristol.ac.uk.
  • Consultations: To discuss your school or faculty’s use of any digital education tool or process, please email digital-education@bristol.ac.uk.

I manage educational content in Blackboard courses

Designing your course

  1. Organise your units in an easy to navigate way.
  2. Use the template and maintain consistency across the units.
  3. Add content such as Documents, Files, Links and Re/Play recordings.
  4. Reuse relevant content from your units in Blackboard Original.
  5. Understand, identify and fix common accessibility issues.
  6. Identify steps you need to take to get your units ready.

Book

Mode and Duration

  • Online, 1.5 hour

Relevant Guidance

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Building interactivity

  1. Understand the benefits of adding interactivity to your course to you and your students.
  2. Access the supported tools through Blackboard.
  3. Add interactivity into Blackboard.
  4. Understand, identify and fix common accessibility issues.
  5. Know where to look for support materials.
  6. Know how to access support and guidance from the DEO.

Book

Mode and Duration

  • Online, 1 hour

Relevant Guidance

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Designing Assessments

Topics

This is a topic-specific, digitally-focused designing workshop, tailored to your requirements.

Topics may include:

  1. Video, audio or mixed-media assessments
  2. Digitally innovative assessments, such as those using AI
  3. Exploring tools to support Programme-Level or Unit-Level assessment.

Please provide details of your needs using the Arrange or deliver local training option. It may be necessary to book a consultation in advance of the training session to ensure it meets the team’s needs.

Book

Mode and Duration

  • Online, 1 hour

Relevant Guidance

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Course Building Retreat

This workshop is best run for whole Schools or Teams, please use the Arrange or deliver local training option to request this workshop.

By the end of this workshop, you will:

  1. Decide how to organise your unit teaching materials.
  2. Start building your unit content and activities.
  3. Understand how to move the content from the sandboxes into your live units.

Book

Mode and Duration

  • In-person, 3 hours

Relevant Guidance

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I administer Blackboard courses

User Management

By the end of this workshop you will be able to:

  1. Enrol and remove users from a course.
  2. Create a group set and a group and add members to a group.
  3. Create release conditions for content.
  4. Post an announcement in a course.
  5. Send an email to a group of users on a course.
  6. Understand and perform basic analytics on student engagement in a course.

Book

Mode and Duration

  • Online, 1 hour

Relevant Guidance

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Assessments, Tests and the Gradebook

By the end of this workshop you will be able to:

  1. Understand submission types in eVision and their corresponding items in Blackboard when configuring summative assessments
  2. Identify the relevant areas of the Gradebook to make changes or check information
  3. Basic Gradebook management
  4. Ensure assessment grades have correct visibility

Book

Mode and Duration

  • Online, 1 hour

Relevant Guidance

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Assessment Workflow Management

This workshop is best run for whole Schools or Teams, please use the Arrange or deliver local training option to request this workshop.

Topics

The workshop covers:

  1. Blackboard Online, OR
  2. Blackboard Offline, OR
  3. Blackboard Tests, OR
  4. Turnitin

Book

Mode and Duration

  • Online, 1.5 hour

Relevant Guidance

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Surgery

This workshop is best run for whole Schools or Teams, please use the Arrange or deliver local training option to request this workshop.

Topics

A chance to ask questions about Blackboard Ultra.

Book

Mode and Duration

  • In-person, 3 hours

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I mark assessments

Assessment Workflow Marking

This workshop is best run for whole Schools or Teams, please use the Arrange or deliver local training option to request this workshop.

By the end of this workshop you will be able to:

  1. Locate and access assessments that need marking.
  2. Use your knowledge of features to find and select appropriate marking and feedback tools for your needs.
  3. Recognise how marks and feedback appear from a student’s perspective.
  4. Locate further guidance on marking and feedback, if needed.

Book

Mode and Duration

  • Online or in-person, 1 hour

Relevant Guidance

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