Blackboard Ultra Design Assistant – Introduction

Introduction

Blackboard Ultra’s Design Assistant is a tool that can help you at various stages of your module development. It can assist you build your course by adding visual content, creating question banks and assessments, and providing discussion board starter posts, amongst other things.

You might wish to read up on Blackboard’s documentation, which includes their guidance policies. This can be accessed here: https://help.blackboard.com/Learn/Instructor/Ultra/Course_Content/Create_Content/AI_Design_Assistant 

Desired cognitive level

Many aspects of the Design Assistant utilise cognitive levels based on Bloom’s taxonomy. You can choose one of the following levels:

  • Apply
  • Analyse
  • Evaluate
  • Create

Alternatively, select “Inspire me!” to provide a mix of the different cognitive levels.

Complexity

Most aspects of the Design Assistant come with a ten level scale of complexity. These range from Early Primary School (Low Level) up to PhD Level (High Level). Whilst it is encouraged to experiment with the different levels, you might find the higher end of the scale produces more appropriate content. However, this is entirely dependant on your own needs.

Contextualised Content Creation

The Design Assistant tool will attempt to analyse the content you are currently generating to provide the most meaningful support. For example, you might be writing an Announcement to inform students about creating a study group. If you then use the Design Assist tool to add an image, it will begin the process by showing you some images related to study or groups.

Different Design Assistant tools

The following aspects all leverage Blackboard’s Design Assistant tool:

  1. Image generation
  2. Question and question bank generation
  3. Discussion Board prompt generation
  4. Journal prompt generation
  5. Assessment activity generation