Author: Carolyn Speer

The Office of Instructional Resources is offering a workshop to help instructors and staff confused by Blackboard Ultra. The next workshop, titled “Please Help Me With Ultra!”, is scheduled 10 a.m.-noon Aug. 10 via Zoom.

The Office of Instructional Resources is offering a workshop to help instructors and staff confused by Blackboard Ultra. The next workshop, titled “Please Help Me With Ultra!”, is scheduled 9 a.m.-11 a.m. Aug. 13 via Zoom.

The Office of Instructional Resources is offering a workshop to help instructors and staff confused by Blackboard Ultra. The first workshop, titled “Please Help Me With Ultra!”, is scheduled 10 a.m.-noon Aug. 2 via Zoom.

Sara Zafar, Wichita State University Office of Institutional Equity and Compliance Human Title IX coordinator, will offer an additional online Advanced Title IX training from 1 to 3 p.m. Aug. 3. The training is part of the August Academic Resources Conference (ARC). The session will last approximately two hours, including an hour for questions.

President Rick Muma will lead a discussion of the book “Broke: The Racial Consequences of Underfunding Public Universities” 2-2:50 p.m. Aug. 12, at Devlin Hall. The event will also be available live on Zoom.

All university community members are welcome to attend. The discussion is part of the August Academic Resources Conference.

If you are interested in reading “Broke” before Aug.12, you can access an ebook copy of the book or a physical copy through University Libraries. If you have trouble accessing the book, contact University Libraries through the Ask a Librarian live chat feature.

Blackboard has gone through several changes lately and there are more to come. If you are confused by Ultra, you’re not alone.

To help  with the confusion, the Office of Instructional Resources has put together several web pages to answer your questions and to give you the information you need to make the necessary choices about your class materials in Blackboard:

• Am I “in Ultra”?
• Ultra Transition Schedule
• What is Ultra?
• Turning on Ultra Course experience
• Using Both “Old” Blackboard and Ultra
• Ultra FAQ

In May, Wichita State University began the transition from the Blackboard platform to the Ultra platform. The complete transition will take more than a year and a half, but you may have noticed significant changes already.

WSU is currently in the “Ultra Base Navigation” platform, which means logging in and finding courses is different than before. However, once professors and students log in, they look almost identical because the move to Ultra is a two-step process. At this time, most WSU courses are still in the Blackboard format.

If you are unsure whether the course you are teaching is in Ultra, please visit the Am I in Ultra? webpage.

The Media Resources Center would like to congratulate Dr. Carolyn Speer on becoming a certified professional in training management (CPTM). The CPTM program is a rigorous six-month experience that prepares training managers to lead institutional training programs that align with and support institutional goals and outcomes. As a CPTM, Carolyn can work with departments and offices to help align their programs with university priorities.

This June issue of Teaching Today explores Ultra and the Academic Resources Conference events in May. To view the highlights from each session, check out the May ARC schedule page.

To get a leg up on Ultra training, you can visit Ultra training pages and click “In This Section” to see the index.

The May issue of Teaching Today is now available, and it’s packed with information about next week’s Academic Resources Conference. This is a great opportunity to look at the conference topics before choosing which to attend. Capping off the issue is an essay by Hadley Perkins about what we can do over the summer to make our classes ready for the freshmen coming in this fall.