September 2024 - New Features in Ultra

Recorded Session

Content Designer: Knowledge Check in Documents

The Knowledge Check block in the Content Designer for Documents is a new feature that improves learning. It allows students to practice and get immediate feedback, and it helps instructors understand their students' learning better.

Example: Knowledge Check question

Course Content Page Enhancements

Key improvements to the Course Content page are aimed at enhancing user experience and engagement. These changes are based on client feedback and focus on:

• Visual depth: A more appealing and inviting interface with subtle gradients, softer edges, and a warmer color palette.
• Page structure: Improved organization and differentiation of course elements, including top-level and nested content.
• Navigation: More intuitive navigation to reduce cognitive load and increase focus on the content.

Overall, these improvements are designed to create a more enjoyable and inviting learning environment for both educators and students.

Please visit the Course Layout Article for details and screenshots.

New Activity - AI Conversation

To better serve instructors who want to use AI with students, we're launching a new activity called AI Conversation. This is a Socratic questioning exercise guided by AI. AI Conversation lets students explore their thoughts on a topic.

There are two elements to the activity:

• AI Conversation
  • This lets students think critically about the topic that the instructor designs.
• Reflection question
  • This asks the student to share their thoughts on the activity. The reflection question also lets the student flag any bias or errors from the AI. Reflection helps students understand the responsible use of AI services.

Create AI Conversation article

Exclude attempt when grading

Returning to Ultra this month is the Exclude attempt feature. Excluding attempts allows instructors to remove submissions from the grading workflow without deleting them.

• Grade calculations ignore excluded attempts.
• Students aren’t automatically granted an additional attempt if an attempt is excluded. You can grant additional attempts to the student via the exception's workflow. 
• Students can see that their attempt has been excluded.
• If you exclude an attempt when the student has no remaining attempts, you receive a warning that their final grade can’t be calculated.

Insert exclude attempts guide

Overview Tab in Gradebook

This tab contains two sections: Needs Grading and Needs Posting.

Needs Grading section

The Needs Grading section is a useful tool for prioritizing your tasks. It allows you to see all items ready for grading and a count of the total number of outstanding grading tasks in your course.

This section displays up to five items at a time, ordered by the oldest ungraded submission. For an item, select Grade now to quickly access the submissions you need to grade. If your course has more than five items that need grading, you can use the buttons at the bottom of section to navigate through all pending tasks.

Needs Posting section

The Needs Posting section increases accessibility of assessments with grades that need posting. For an item, select Post now to its grade If there are more than five items that need posting, you can use the buttons at the bottom of section to navigate through the pending tasks.

Student Activity Log

Now the Student Overview page has a student activity log. Instructors and other higher roles can use the report to check what a particular student did in a course.

The Activity log can be filtered by event type and can look to the past 140 days. Any information older than that won’t be stored in this report. The log can take up to 20 minutes to update from the last time a student performs an action.

The following events can be found in the report:

• Course Access
• Assessment Started
• Assessment Draft saved
• Assessment Submitted
• Assessment Auto-submitted
• Discussion Access
• Discussion Draft saved
• Discussion Edit
• Discussion Reply
• Discussion Response
• Document Access
• Journal Access
• LTI Item Access
• SCORM item Access (not used at USAHS)