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.

Table of Contents

Conversations
Discussions
Create Discussions
Student Activity
Groups
Create Course Groups
Course Groups

Additional Resources

Add content in Learn Ultra Create Assessments in Learn Ultra 🆕Groups & Alternative Assessments

🚩For Blackboard Original courses, see the following:

Blackboard & Meetings

🏴This information applies only to Blackboard Learn Ultra.

Conversations can be enabled for individual content items so students can discuss the content with you and their classmates. With conversations, students can ask for help, share sources, or answer questions others may have. As the conversation develops, it appears only with the relevant content.

Discussions encourage students to consider their thoughts and construct their ideas before they post. With discussion prompts, students can extend their contributions beyond the classroom. As the discussion develops, students continue learning and build a sense of community.

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.

💡

When creating discussions from the navigation bar, you have the option to include the discussion on the Course Content page. When creating discussions inline with Course Content, discussions automatically appear under the Discussions menu.

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

🆕

Allow anonymous posts for ungraded discussions: Toggle anonymity on or off as the discussion progresses, any existing anonymous posts keep their anonymity.

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.

💡

Each student receives a separate message to ensure privacy, no other student recipients are visible.

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

You can create as many course groups as you want, with any number of students in each group.

Custom group
Randomly assigned
Self-enrollment
Reuse 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.

💡

When the enrollment period ends, students can no longer join groups, and they’re enrolled automatically.

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.

💡

IMPORTANT: If you save a Custom group set, return to the group set, and select Custom again, your groups are deleted.