Preview Week for Summer Session 1 begins Thursday, May 12
Any Blackboard Summer 1 courses that have been requested before 5/12 will be administratively made available to students for Preview Week.
Summer 2 courses will not be opened during this time.
Summer and Fall 2022 Blackboard Courses
Summer and Fall 2022 Blackboard course requests are open Don’t forget that each semester you will need to request Blackboard for the courses you are teaching.
For detailed instructions, see:
Request your Summer and Fall Echo360 courses
Echo360 course requests for Summer and Fall 2022 are available in SPIRE. Just like Blackboard, each semester you will need to request Echo360 for the courses you want to use it in. For step by step instructions, see Request Lecture Capture
Echo360 allows you to create recordings of your lectures to deliver to students. Students can access recordings to learn new content or review content to reinforce the information. The system also allows you to add interactive content and measure student engagement.
Echo360 Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) uses speech to text algorithms to create an interactive transcript for your recordings. After you do a little editing for accuracy, your students will be able to study for exams, find relevant information in recordings, and even turn on Closed Captioning for your media.
Once your Echo360 courses are ready, it’s easy to give students access to Echo360 recordings through Blackboard.
Automatically copy your Zoom cloud recordings to Echo360
You can connect your Zoom and Echo360 accounts, and have all cloud recordings copied into Echo360. If you enable this, you can even have a recurring Zoom meeting publish directly to an Echo360 course. Unlike Zoom recordings, which are kept for 120 days, Echo360 does not have a storage limit on your recordings.
A New Blackboard Theme Coming Soon
Blackboard will be migrating to a new theme. A new theme will update the look and feel of your course site. It will also include responsive design options which will allow your students to access your course on mobile browsers.
The functionality of your Blackboard course, including materials you’ve added, quizzes, discussions, etc… will remain the same. Stay tuned for updates!
Blackboard Tip of the Month:
Did you know that Blackboard allows you to organize the columns of your grade center? Changing the order of columns can help structure your grade center to match your syllabus and grading scheme. Most instructors choose to either order columns chronologically based on due date, or by assignment type with, for example, all discussions grouped together.
Planned downtimes
There are no planned downtimes for Blackboard in May 2022.
You can check the status of Blackboard, Zoom, and other supported teaching technologies on the IT Services Status for Remote Teaching and Learning page.
Blackboard help and resources for instructors
To learn more about Blackboard or to get help, you can:
- Review our Blackboard Support Articles.
- Contact the Instructional Media Lab (instruct@umass.edu) with a question, or to set up a time for a one-on-one consultation.
- Join our Instructor Support Zoom room Monday-Friday between 10am and 3pm to meet with a staff member. Please note that wait times depend on the volume of requests.
- Contact the 24/7 Blackboard Helpdesk. The helpdesk can also assist students directly.