Conversations & Discussions in Learn Ultra

You can now enable class conversations for course content to facilitate quick questions and exchanges. You can also create gradable discussions with course content or as a general discussion tool with improved assessment metrics.

🏴This information applies only to Blackboard Learn Ultra.

Conversations

You can Allow class conversations for documents, assignments, assessments, links, and tools.

The Open class conversations icon appears in the upper-right corner.

When someone contributes to a conversation, an icon appears next to the item's title on the Course Content page. Both students and instructors can click the …ellipsis menu to select Conversation from the menu.

Conversations are set up similar to discussions, two levels of replies are allowed for each first-level response. New responses and replies appear with a New icon.

You can view and participate in conversations for groups or the entire class. Select the group title to access the list and make a selection. A purple circle indicates new activity.

As the conversation develops, it appears only with the relevant content. Conversations do not appear on the discussions page.

Discussions

Discussions can be created as Course Content or using the Discussion tool from the course navigation bar.

Create Discussions

You can create course and group discussions where only members of the group may access the discussion.

You can organize discussions in folders and Allow students to create discussions topics.

• Developing successful online discussions

Student Activity

You can make discussions count for a grade to evaluate student activity.

Open the Settings next to a discussion and select Student Activity to view information about the discussion:

• Active students
• Average posts per student
• Average word count
• Average discussion grade
• Participation
• Students who haven't participated
• Responses with the most replies
• Top participants

The participation bar highlights in blue the percentage of students who have opened the discussion and participated.

• Select a comment from the Comments with the most replies section to view that discussion
• Select a student from the Top Participants section to open that student’s discussion contributions

You can Message the students who haven't participated or select an individual student to Message them directly.

As you grade a discussion, you can use the following metrics to help determine a grade:

• Substantive posts: The number of responses and replies that contribute to the discussion's development.
• Sentence complexity: Average grade level readability for the student's posts.
• Lexical variation: Count of content words and functional words. Content words support the student's ideas, while functional words support proper grammar.
• Critical thinking level: Percentage of words and phrases within a student's total posts that demonstrate critical thinking.
• Word variation: Percentage of unique words in a student's responses and replies.

Averages are calculated by comparing a student's responses and replies to those of other students participating in the same discussion.

Groups

You can organize students into groups so they can interact with each other and demonstrate their knowledge while learning to appreciate different perspectives. Groups can be assigned to a discussion, assignment, or test.

Create Course Groups

When you set up self-enrollment in groups, students receive a course announcement and an activity stream notification about the available groups. You can define an enrollment period so students are notified when the enrollment deadline approaches.

Course Groups

All course groups and group sets with no members appear on the Course Groups page. Group sets with no members also appear. The number of group sets and individual groups are listed at the top of the page.